Chapo Trap House - 471 - Poppy, Part 1 (11/12/20)

Episode Date: November 23, 2020

For the 57th anniversary of the JFK assassination, we're unlocking the first installment of our George H.W. Bush series. The first part of our in-depth look into the life and career of George H.W. Bush. Covering the many generations of Bush family history in the United States, his father’s business dealings with Nazi Germany, H.W.’s military career and education at Yale, and the intricate web of intelligence, finance, and industrial interests surrounding him that all point to one day: November 22, 1963.

Can I tell you a little story? Please. When I came here, one journalist said, anybody dumb enough to accept the job is too dumb to do it. He got a great laugh from people, because it's kind of a funny line. Let's face it. But God, I said to myself, how sad for our country

when we're facing some tough, tough opposition in this world to take such a cynical view of intelligence in the 1976 time. He got his laugh, and I got my little hurt inside from it. But it made me determined that I'm going to approach this job with pride, and they can give all the jokes they want on television about the CIA. It's vital to the national security of the United States.

And I feel so dedicated and strongly about it that I just wanted to wedge that in apropos and no question you've asked. How long are you going to stay? I serve at the pleasure of the president. I understand that. How long are you going to stay? I'm going to stay as long as the president wants me to stay.

There's no politics in this thing. For me, good heavens. You have to be hallucinating to think there is any political mileage in this kind of a job. All I'm going to do is give trouble. All I'm going to do is give trouble. I'm going to tell the truth. All I'm going to do is give trouble.

Hello, friends. It's Choco. We're back again. It's me, Matt, with the looks coming at you. Rainy Thursday afternoon here in New York. And I've got to say, either the election is over or it will never be over. I think we are caught in between this sort of purgatory

in between those two possible outcomes. Where are the quantum realm? Yeah, we're Schrodinger's cat right now when it comes to the election. And the fact of the matter is the election is never going to be over. Even if Trump leaves the White House, I fully suspect him to basically, as I said before,

become the anti-president or just start running for reelection in 2024 immediately. So no real satisfactory resolution to that. Outside of that, COVID is ravaging the country worse than it has ever before. Literally every state in America is now a hotspot, not just New York City or LA or elsewhere. It's fucking everywhere.

And it's worse than it's ever been. And New York is on the verge of going back into curfew after trying to reopen the last couple of months. That's not going to work. Nothing is going to work. We're stuck with this. So I think now would be a good time for us to not focus on the present, but take a trip into the past,

into the annals of American history. And before you guys begin, part one of our long-anticipated history of the life and career of another one-term president, that's right, folks. I'm talking about George Herbert Walker Bush. This has been sort of percolating in the Chapo ether for quite some time now. And we're going to give a go at narrating for you basically

the sort of background of the Bush family and the life and career of George H.W. Bush, I think up until about the Kennedy assassination. There is just so much to talk about here. There are so many different threads that run through his life and connect it to these truly grand and secret parts of American history that we will not have time in this episode

to get into Watergate or Iran-Contra or any of the things he did as director of the CIA or how he got to be director of the CIA in the first place or his presidency. So I think part one, we're going to do our best here to lay out the early life and career of George H.W. Bush, going from being in the US Navy, US Navy pilot, to a Yale-Eskill and Bones guy, to a Texas oil guy,

to a senator, to director of the CIA. And all of these threads in his family and life do seem to coalesce in Dallas, November 22, 1963. I've done my best to sort of summarize and outline a lot of this information, but hopefully my co-host, Felix and Matt, will be able to fill in some of the gaps. And we'll just see where this takes us. I should say, off the bat, that a lot of the information

I'm going off here comes courtesy of journalist Russ Baker's book, Family of Secrets. And I think it should be noted before we go much further that the book, Family of Secrets, was excoriated by his fellow journalists and people like at the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times and the Book Reviews, and his fellow journalist when it came out.

I just want to read one clip here. Tim Rootin, former media critic for the Los Angeles Times, described the book as an example of the paranoid style of literature, as described by Richard Hofstetter. He says here, what makes Baker's book singularly offensive is the way it recklessly impunes in the most disgusting possible way. The reputation is not simply of men and women now dead,

but of the living. So, guys, let's do it. I mean, if there's one thing we're good at, it is Calumny directed against. Oh my god, defaming folks is a core competency over here. I mean, a lot of the criticisms of the book is that it relies heavily on innuendo, guilt by association, and just seeming to suggest a uniting thread

to disparate events and people that may not warrant it. But when you do assemble all those disparate events and people as it relates to the life of George H. W. Bush, a certain outline does begin to take shape. And I think a good comparison to this book would be Tom O'Neill's chaos, in that there is sort of one inciting factor incident that put Baker on this fucking lifelong fucking trip down

this endless rabbit hole of basically the secret history of power in America in the latter half of the 20th century. And it's such that there is an astonishing amount of information is gathered and marshaled to point towards the outlines of something that suggests something sinister. But there is never, of course, going to be anything close to a capital T journalistic truth

standard of a definitive answer to anything. But that has never stopped us in the past. Reading family of secrets, I've been reading it at the same time as I've been reading NATO's secret armies. And one thing I was wishing during all of this is that I do think Robert Kerry's book about Robert Moses of Power Brokers is an essential book for understanding America and specifically understanding New York

and one of the reasons why American cities are the way they are. But I wish he had undertaken this effort about George H. W. Bush. Because, OK, comparing him to Trump, comparing one-term presidents, at the end of the day, all Trump has done his entire life and all he did in the presidency was ride a wave. And then just do the bare minimum once he got in there.

H. W. created the wave. His entire life, his entire life, he's always been everywhere. We aren't going to give you any definitive theories of what we 100% think happened. You should go back to our JFK episode. We have theories. But in every theory we could present with the information

we have, in the same way that Robert Moses built the modern New York, George H. W. Bush did build the modern America and the modern American empire. And then he got turfed out of office after one term because the GDP did a whoopsy for three months after an entire life spelt like playing the American political economy like a strativarius, eating a mile of shit and being condescended to by certified Alzheimer's patient,

Ronald Reagan, so that he could have a chance to finally and cleaning up Iran contra for him and then grabbing the brass ring, setting up a war to happen so that you can be like the fucking, you know, the Charlemagne of the post Cold War era. And then there's Hillbilly with the saxophone says, you're not sad enough that it costs a lot of money

to buy milk now. And you don't know what a cash register looks like. Oh, it's a question of not knowing how a checkout works with the laser scanning of the bar code. A lifetime of service to MOLOC in the deep state and the guy who just gets it under the wire, gets in there, young upstart to take over the position as MOLOC's general secretary on earth

is I'm just a small town pedophile. That's the guy. That's the way she goes, man. That's the way she goes in life. It's the law of the road, Bubs. It's the law of the road. And then also, I mean, it should also be noted that the real culmination and fulfillment

of the Bush family legacy, the two term champion, George W. Bush, his eldest son, destroyed all of it. Just destroyed all of it. And now the Bush name is forever associated with basically incompetence, failure, and the death of the American empire, and not its golden age. This is the golden age arc of the American deep state

as seen through the life of George H.W. Bush. So before we get into that, I think it bears just going through briefly here as quickly as possible the lineage of the entire Bush family in the United States of America. And Chris, our producer, was nice enough to put together this abridged version of the legacy of the Bush family in America, starting

with H.W.'s great, great, great, great grandfather, Timothy Bush Sr., who lived from 1735 to 1815. He was a revolutionary war militia captain. And that is about as much as important to know about him. Then we have his great, great, great grandfather, Timothy Bush Jr., who lived from 1776 to 1850, who was a blacksmith. His great, great grandfather, Obadiah Bush, was a school master in Rochester, New York,

an abolitionist, and in fact, vice president of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and then eventually struck out for California in the 1849 gold rush, wanted to move his family out there but died on a boat returning to the East Coast to wrap up his affairs and was, in fact, buried at sea off Cape Horn in South America. Then you've got his great grandfather, James Smith Bush,

who lived from 1825 to 1889. And this is where we begin to see the outlines of what we know of and think of as the Bush Dynasty. Was this guy or one of his direct antecedents are the Bushes who met a man at a crossroads late at night who had a vicious dog in a completely white suit and had him sign his name in a book? This is where the deal got made for the Bushes.

And what evidence do we have of this? Of course, James Smith Bush was the first Bush to attend Yale. He was in the Yale class of 1844. That's where they have, all the professors are demons. And they all have a deal to make with you. They've all got a lot to offer you in this world and the next. James Bush Sr. was also an Episcopal priest.

He had a stint at Grace Church in San Francisco as well as Church of the Ascension in West Brighton, at West Brighton Staten Island, actually, but left in scandal after a church raffle for a gold watch was considered gambling. So he had to leave the church after a church raffle gambling scandal. Of course, then he became a Unitarian in 1888

and died suddenly while raking leaves in 1889. It's known as the Unitarian's Curse, folks. Yeah, those leaves, they'll get you. OK, then we got grandfather Samuel Prescott Bush, 1863 to 1948. Samuel Prescott Bush was the general manager of the Buckeye Steel Casting Company, which was a firm run by Frank Rockefeller, brother of John D. Clients of Buckeye Steel Casting included

railroads controlled by E.H. Harriman. And of course, the Bush and Harriman families became closely associated for two generations. And the Harriman clan definitely shows up in HW's life and basically everything's swirling around. Oil, the CIA, and money. If the Bushes are the soprano family, and Zapata slash dresser, that's boron sanitation,

I would call the Harriman's the appreals. Yes, definitely. Let's see, we got here in 1908, Frank Rockefeller retires and Samuel Prescott Bush becomes president of Buckeye Castings and basically becomes one of the top industrialists of the early 20th century. He then became chief of ordinance, small arms, and ammunitions on the Ward Industries Board during World

War I. He served on the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and was appointed to President Herbert Hoover's Committee for Unemployment Relief in 1931. I'm sure he did a great job at ending unemployment and the depression, so much so that FDR became president shortly thereafter. OK, then we get to George H.W. Bush's father, the great Prescott Sheldon Bush, who

was another Yalee and another Skull and Bones member who was rumored to be among the Bonesmen who supposedly dug up and removed the skull of Apache leader Geronimo. And apparently that skull still is used in Skull and Bones. That is basically the skull in the name Skull and Bones, refers to Geronimo's skull, one of the great fighters against the American state that has ever lived. They dug up his skull and have been jacking off into it

like a fucking sock for the last few generations of leaders. That is the definition of a sore winner. Yeah. It's like you've got the entire continent to wreak your dark arts upon. Why do you got to do this awful end zone dance? Yeah, I mean. I mean, yeah, they're desecrating the mortal

remains of one of the great heroes of history, really. One of the great figures of resistance to the American state that's ever lived. And yeah, they are still desecrating his corpse to this day as part of their fruity rituals, which induct each successive new generation of the ruling class. The most of Prescott's life is very distorted.

And most of his activities in Yale are repulsive. Most of his activities later in life are even more repulsive. A thoroughly awful American who did awful things his entire life. But a little bit of fun trivia. He was the first member of the Bush family to be a member of the Yale cheerleading squad. Yes.

A tradition followed by his son and grandson. Yes. He was a male cheerleader at Yale. He would then go on to be a field artillery captain in the American Expeditionary Force of World War I, during which he received intelligence training and served with the French officer corps. So basically, he received intelligence training

from the guys and paths of glory that directed an artillery barrage at their own troops. That's who he was associating with during World War I. It was then sort of Jack of all trades businessman. He worked for the hardware, rubber, and rubber companies, as well as merchant banks. And then also was accused of being a conspirator in the 1934 business plot.

Yes. The business plot was a conspiracy and basically a near coup that was organized by American business leaders to overthrow FDR as president. And because he was going to turn America Bolshevik. This was, of course, the one that Smedley Butler famously blew the whistle on. Yeah.

Just some guys being dudes. And then, of course, and then after his involvement in the business plot, he became a senator from 1952 to 1963. He was one of the seven founding directors of the Union Banking Company, which was an investment bank that operated as a clearinghouse for the German interest of Fritz Tyson, one of the primary early bankrollers of the Nazi movement,

and, of course, the Tyson Krupp Company, known for their good or bad elevators, depending on what kind of radiance you have. You judge which part of his legacy is darker. It's up to you. By the way, the Krupps in Tissen Krupp, they're also Nazi collaborators. They were the arms manufacturer.

So that's all like, Tissen Krupp is Nazis all the way down. Yeah. Mr. Otis never called me Kite. The Union Banking Corporation held gold on behalf of German banking interests during World War II through the Dutch bank, Bank of Warhandel. In 1942, the bank was seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act after it was discovered to be holding and trading funds

on behalf of the Tyson family up to eight months after the US declared war on Germany. Oh, a dip. Sorry. Well, sometimes you just don't get around to things. Exactly. You know, it was on the list for a long time, but other stuff kept coming up.

Yeah, they didn't have email chains back then. It's true. The workflow was dog shit. Oh, I forgot. I forgot about the war, my bad. Prescott Bush was also involved with the Consolidated Silcian Steel Company, or CSSC, which split ownership between Frederick Flick and Brown Brothers Harriman.

There's that Harriman family again, where Bush worked under the Silesian American Corporation. Flick's plants in Poland made heavy use of concentration camp slave labor in the 30s and was later found guilty of war crimes at Nuremberg. Well, I do have a few mistakes. Prescott Bush, of course, actively intervened in Germany during the 30s to manage BBH interests.

That was Brown Brothers Harriman, including dispatching John Foster Dulles, then of the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, to manage liability to American directors. His evidence of ownership of SAC over the German CSSC mysteriously vanishes post-1935. However, according to journalist John Joftus, quote, at various times, the Bush family

has tried to spin it, saying they were owned by a Dutch bank. And it wasn't until Nazis took over Holland that they realized how the Nazis had apparently controlled their company. And this is why Bush supporters claim, when the war was over, they got their money back. Both the American Treasury investigations and the intelligence investigations in Europe

completely belie that. It's absolute horseshit. They always knew who the ultimate beneficiaries were. Prescott is also long rumored to have taken $1.5 million. That's $24.8 million in 2020 currency. A payout from his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, of BBH for this, though no conclusive paper trail has ever been found.

So he basically took a huge cash settlement to cover up the Harriman's family's collaboration with the Nazis during World War II. So yeah, that is just a few of the highlights of grandfather Prescott Bush's career, which is one that is marked by being one of the titans of industry in America in the early 20th century and then tried to overthrow FDR's government

in a military coup and then basically profited from concentration camp slave labor and covered and just laundered, just God knows how much money for the Nazis. And created how many jobs? Yeah, you didn't even say, because you don't care. So here's where we, I think we should begin our story with George H.W. Bush.

And it all begins when basically, Russ Baker says, this was the premier magazine, 50th anniversary of the Manson killings or whatever, like the 25th anniversary of the Manson killings. What was it, when did Tom O'Neill start with that? I forget. It was 98, yeah, 99.

So the little factoid that led him down this rabbit hole is when he discovered a mention in a report that George H.W. Bush claimed that he could not remember where he was on November 22nd, 1963, which is a astonishingly odd thing to say for any adult alive in America on that day. It is sort of weird.

That's like the one thing. It's like 9-11, everyone knows exactly where they were and they heard that that happened. That is, the thing that's always fucked with me about this is why couldn't he come up with a lie? Yeah. Like out of all people to not lie about it, why not him? Yeah, and he was there, he had a cover.

He was there to meet a bunch of Texas oil men. Well. Nothing suspicious about that. Nothing, nothing. I think H.W. Bush has said in other places that he was quote, somewhere in Texas on that day. But he, of course, couldn't remember where he was. I might have been grassy, I might have been rocky.

I was, it was just, it was a knoll of some kind. It's all all stipulated. But we should begin here with like one of the first sort of keys that unlocked this whole saga is that, I forget when, but it was sometime in the 1980s. The entertainment journalist Joseph McBride, who worked for the Daily Variety at the time, came across a memo in the archives

of the University of San Bernardino while researching a book about the life of Frank Capra. And he got off on a tangent in the micro fees section about the JFK assassination. McBride had been a volunteer for the Kennedy campaign. And of course, like, you know, most Americans has always remained interested in the unanswered questions about Dallas.

He found this memo from J. Edgar Hoover, which was dated November 29th, 1963, that was titled, Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It reported that the day after the assassination, the bureau gave a briefing to two men in Dallas, one, a Captain William Edwards of the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and a Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency.

It briefed these men on the activity of anti-Castro Cubans. And McBride, while reading this, you know, thought Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency surely this wasn't the same person as the current vice president of the United States. Now, keep in mind here, Bush had been the director of the CIA for about a year and came to, I mean, during the 70s, during the late 70s, he was appointed director of the CIA.

And he came in during a time of intense pressure on the agency related to the previous decades worth of fuckups and embarrassment. There was, of course, the Kennedy assassination and the Warren commission. And then there are all the revelations of how the CIA had used private foundations to channel funds to organizations inside the United States,

such as the National Student Organization. Then, of course, there was Watergate and then the whole fucking, just the number of CIA operatives such as E. Howard Hunt that were all associated with it. And this whole, like, you know, like the church commission and H.W. Bush was chosen at the time, seemingly, because he had no connections to the CIA or any of its bad shit over the last decade or so.

And it was considered something of a lightweight. He was named by Gerald Ford, and I'm quoting from Russ Baker here, he seemed wholly unqualified for the position, especially at a time when the agency was under maximum scrutiny. He had been UN ambassador, Republican National Committee Chairman and U.S. envoy to Beijing,

where both Nixon and Henry Kissinger had regarded him as a lightweight and worked around him. What experience did he have in the world of intelligence and spying? Or how would he restore public confidence in a tarnished spy agency? No one seemed to know, or did Gerald Ford realize something that most others didn't?

And that is, as this memo would seem to imply, George H.W. Bush has had a much longer association with the CIA than one that began with him being appointed director of the agency in 1976. Yeah, the CIA also, the cover for this memo is very interesting, that they get into the family of secrets. The initial response to it was that there was another George Bush

who worked for the CIA. Yeah, right, the guy who worked in like the fucking mail room or something. Yeah, he was basically, he was, whatever Lloyd does for Ari and Andrage, that was his job at the CIA. He just got mail and probably just got yelled at by Mormons and alcoholics.

Or alcoholic Mormons, those are the best CIA agents, the Mormons who drink. The craziest CIA agents are the Mormons who drink and the Irish who don't. Yeah, awesome. But so, the failed George Bush, this guy who didn't really have a clearance was a clerk, like a glorified intern

who only worked nights, which is, the 50s and 60s were awesome. You could get a night job at the CIA if you were white. If you were a white Protestant, people would be, yeah. Go ahead, work the night shift on the CIA and make a $2 an hour, which is enough to buy a nine bedroom house in Silver Springs. But I digress, he had no clearance.

Why would they send George Bush, the night desk worker, a memo about threats on President Kennedy's life? An interagency memo, which you have to have very high clearance to be debriefed on. And it was a memo that was specifically related to the activities of anti-Castro Cubans and this idea that they might use the confusion or implications of a Kennedy assassination

to launch a second wave of attacks against Cuba. And they wanted to keep these guys in pocket. So yeah, the memo was all related to the connections to anti-Castro Cubans, which is, of course, a huge part of the Kennedy assassination. Now, McBride followed up about this memo and contacted the White House. He never talked to George H.W. Bush directly,

but did talk to Stephen Hart, who was a member of the administration and I think part of the national security team, who responded to him by quoting Bush directly, who says, quote, I was in Houston, Texas at the time and involved in an independent oil drilling business and I was running for Senate in late 1963. I don't have any idea of what he was talking about.

Must be another George Bush, is how it concluded. Now, McBride went on to publish a piece about this memo in the nation. And after that piece came out, and no one made much of a deal of it, it was barely noticed, but following up on that, the CIA told him in response to this article that it was indeed another George Bush,

the one that Felix referred to, a man named George William Bush, who that they always, on their payroll at the time, but now apparently the CIA, one of the most powerful government agencies in the world with billions of dollars at their disposal, could not find George William Bush. However, Joseph McBride did detract him down.

And in 1988, he was working as a claims representative for the Social Security Administration. And as Felix outlaid out earlier, he explained that he had been worked only briefly at the CIA as a probationary civil servant, and only in Langley, Virginia. He was in the CIA headquarters in November 1963, and never in his career received any briefings,

and certainly not any interagency briefings during his career. Now, if we jump ahead in time now to 2006, there is another declassified document that comes to light. This one dates to 1975, right before George H.W. Bush became CIA director, that flatly states that the man soon to be in charge

of the relationship of the agency had a relationship with the agency that dates back all the way into 1953. It says here, quote, he became aware of this project through Mr. Thomas J. Devine, a former CIA staff employee and later oil wildcatting associate of Mr. Bush. Their joint activities culminated in the establishment of Zapata Oil in 1953, which they eventually sold.

After the sale of Zapata Oil, Mr. Bush went into politics, and Mr. Devine became a member of the investment firm, Train, Cabot, and Associates New York. They attached a memorandum, describes the close relationship between Mr. Devine and Bush in 1967 to 1968, which according to Mr. Allen, continued while Mr. Bush was our ambassador

to the United Nations. Now, keep in mind here, so this figure, Thomas Devine, who was the guy who founded Zapata Petroleum, Zapata Oil, and Zapata Offshore, with Mr. Bush, with George H.W. Bush, when he broke into the oil industry in Texas, was a CIA agent. However, Thomas Devine resigned from the agency

at the age of 27, which is highly unusual, considering all the training he would have had to, all the training, time, and money that would have been invested in someone like Thomas Devine being part of the agency. However, it's not so strange when you consider the CIA has a long history of people, quote, unquote, resigning to go on to work in the private sector.

And of course, Zapata Petroleum was established in 1953. So here we get into Zapata Oil and the entire oil business, which is of course, from its inception in America, always been joined at the hip with like the sort of national security state, the deep state, even before those were a thing. Long before the OSS existed or the CIA existed, basically oil companies and the attorneys at the law firms

that represented them, basically were well versed in sort of proto espionage. And indeed, many of the early recruits to the OSS, which would then become the CIA, were from the oil industry precisely because they had experience with international spying on competitors and industrial espionage. HW and Devine found Zapata Oil in 1953,

and it basically becomes the perfect cover for both international travel and the recruitment of assets and operatives for the CIA. But however, HW's history with intelligence goes back to even before his World War I experience. And that is when he joined the Navy at 18 and 1942, and he in Norfolk, Virginia, received training as both a torpedo pilot,

but also as an aerial photographer, as part of something called Operation Snapshot, which was a highly secret, like it was directed at the Japanese, but it was basically, it was like using spy planes and what would become the same technology of like the U2 spy planes. This was a very, very early version of using like intelligence gathering through aerial photography.

Operation Snapshot was so secret that you could be court-martialed for even saying the name Operation Snapshot while it was in operation. According to a book by Robert Stinnett, who was also a Navy pilot during World War II, Admiral Mark Mitscher hit the bulkhead quote when he saw that the Bush's team had filed a report in which they actually referred by name

to this top secret project. The three people above Bush in his command were made to take razor blades to the pages of the report and remove the forbidden language. Now, according to Baker, this is Bush's first, the first time Bush had been stung by the disclosure of information. And then he learned the lesson very well

throughout the rest of his life in terms of excising information about people, places, and things that you did that were agency or sort of covert related that like you just don't talk about them or you use PR and obfuscation to manage those facts in your biography and resume. But from there, after World War II, of course, HW goes to Yale,

which was by then a farm team for the CIA. I mean like... That's the equivalent, we've basically replaced covert rule in our empire with just overt military rule now. Like the CIA is just another arm of JSOC. So the modern day equivalent would be like a Bud's training or like the SEAL program. Yeah, SEAL teams, nothing really shows

American cultural degeneration more than replacing, as Will said, the Mormon alcoholics and the Irish teatotalers, interesting characters, your hard drinking Engeltins, Edwin P. Wilson always in his bag, all our guys. Frank Weiser just skitsing out at every dinner party. They were, they had some good times. They had some dudes.

They had some dudes. Did he got leave just pranking Frank Olson with the old acid in the drink? I mean, there's a quote here. They've been replaced by SEALs. I mean, I think it was something crazy, like three or four of Trump's initial cabinet appointees were former Navy SEALs.

Yeah, that's Zinke Asshole who like was just stealing the fucking, he was just taking the toilet paper out of the bathrooms at the Department of the Interior. And created his own challenge coins for the Department of the Interior. Navy SEALs, they love stealing, but they're sort of the perfect, their role at the forefront of the American Empire now

as a public face of it. It reminds me of what Patrick Wyman said about how the late stage of empire always signals the death of the country because the frontier comes home. The Navy SEAL is the ideal frontiersmen because he has no affections, is a completely heartless killer.

Hard, desolate the killer like DH Lawrence said. Yeah. But almost, I will actually not even just like heartless, they have like a lust for killing. Yeah, love it. That is like unmatched by even some of their predecessors. And their main thing is their aesthetic, their frontier aesthetic, the long beards,

the fucking cool knives. The keifa. Yeah, the tactical clothing that we resell to suburban fatso's. And it is, I mean, it was awful when the CIA ran things. It was awful when, you know, we ran things through just a battery of NATO bureaucracy. It was awful when it was, you know,

the free trade Troika under Clinton. But this really fucking sucks. This really sucks, Dick. I hate this. Yeah. I hate the Navy SEAL. Some asshole, it's like, look, you know, James Angleton will like sit in the dark drinking

and staring at a wall. You guys are like doing fucking TikToks where you're lip-syncing while shooting watermelons with BLM written on them. So you can sell fucking coffee to roofs. Yeah. Yeah, Edwin, yeah. At least they had bigger imaginations back then.

Wilson made what, like 400 million selling shit to Libya. It's like these fucking hicks are just doing summer, like doing anivar ass ejection parties and then doing somersaults to commemorate, to commemorate people who died in an experimental helicopter crash. No, yeah, no, Felix. Yeah.

I was like, in my reading for this, I didn't write it down. I forgot who said it, but there was a quote from one of these early CIA guys from like a memoir or a statement that someone reported about him about those years. And he just said, man, the fun we had. And I think that sums it up.

You know, these were like, you know, sort of like preppy college boys who were, you know, they were given the world to run. And, you know, like they did it through, you know, just imbibing courts of scotch, white swapping and, you know, wearing smart ties and Tweet jackets and shit. Riding Kim Filby around your solarium like a dog.

We, you know what? And then today it's the Black Rifle Coffee Guys. Just yelling at you on a TikTok video, as Matt said about like, what a pussy you are for drinking Starbucks. Yeah. It like, it used to be all these alcoholics sitting around completely naked in a really hot office, totally wet

and reciting poetry in Greek, even though they were wasted beyond repair. And now it's like these guys, yeah, making TikToks to Aaron Lewis songs, crime. Like, it sucks, man. Makes me sick how far we done fell. Yeah. But, you know, just to return to Yale

and like the era of George H.W. Bush's graduating class. I don't know if it was his graduating class or the one before it, but like just to give you like an idea of what a farm team it was for the CIA, 35 men from one of the graduating classes would go on to work for the agency. 35 guys went to the same fucking place.

And that's just of we know of. And, you know, here comes H.W., his father Prescott. He's got, you know, he's got Yale fucking pedigree going back to generations. He has already has experience in Navy intelligence under his belt because of World War II. And of course he joins Skull and Bones at Yale. Oh yeah.

Just like his father. Where he jacks off at a coffin next to Geronimo's skull. Just like his father. The real thing that he really did, not a joke. Yep. He was also, as a Bones man, he was nicknamed Mammon. And Mammon was a nickname that every class had and it was for the horniest guy in the class.

So one thing we know about a Poppy is that he was, he was laying pipe of some kind or another. Well, if I can get into phrenology a little bit, Poppy does have the skull and build of a guy with a dick that's too wide for his body. But you know, I have a good friend who had about Poppy's build and he was just like, we lived in the same, we lived in the attic together

when we lived in St. Paul, Minnesota. We were both very broke. And he would just walk around naked and it was just like nine inches flat. It was the most insane thing I've ever seen. And that's what I think Poppy was like probably. He was, he was, he was, he was hanging dog. Well here, I mean, but like here's the thing

about Skull and Bones, right? It's that it is the oldest secret society of the American IVs. But what does it really do, right? I mean, like, I mean, on, on, on the surface it is like Bohemian Grove, this kind of like fruity theater kid thing, right? It's like these preppies have their little dinner clubs

and they dress in costumes and they sing songs and they have these like weird rituals, like you said, where you jack off in a coffin with Geronimo's fucking skull. And that, you know, you, you do like, you have to confess all of your deepest secrets and like a group of men who are like, you know, nude from the waist up or just, or from the waist down.

I forget how the ritual goes. But it's all, it's all this kind of like, you know, yeah, like I said, like, like Bohemian Grove, it's a lot of this theater kid shit. It is just, you know, like it has like a, a tinge of the- It's a distraction for these rich, rich fancy Fauntleroids. You know, it has a, it has a tinge of the sinister,

but when you really get down to it, I mean, it's, it's pretty stupid. But, but here's the thing, what is it really all about? Like these secret societies and their secret rituals and their secret code words and their secret fucking hand shakes and all that bullshit. What is it really all about? It's about proving that you can keep secrets.

That's how that's what it, that's, that, that is, is, that is its function. And that is why Skull and Bones and Yale and Princeton and places like that minted this entire generation of like business, intelligence, news and military leaders who, I mean, again, it's not a conspiracy. All of these people were friends. All of these people went to the same schools.

All their dads were friends. All these people literally in the same secret societies with each other. Going back to criticisms of family of secrets. I mean, yes, I do think there is probably some journalist, journalistic malpractice in the book, but in the end, if you intend to write a, intend to make a full counting of this family

and specifically of HW, you have to work on innuendos and circumstantial evidence because so much of this is undocumented. You only see the result because so much of this is a result of these people first meeting each other when they're 18 and fucking jerking off in a coffin. All of this is said without record, without anyone writing it down,

without anyone seeing it, and then it just happens. Yeah. That is what you have to work with. Yeah, and Felix, I mean, to this point, it's like you're also left with only innuendo because these people are very, very adept at making sure that that is all that you have to go off of based on their fucking resume and life story.

I mean, as per the example about Operation Snapshot and him getting reamed out for just even saying the word in an official memo. I mean, this is why George HW Bush in his memoirs has nothing about Dallas 1963. It has nothing about where he was or what he was doing or even any recollection of the assassination itself or mention of it.

In fact, the only sources we have to go off that are Barbara Bush's book where she let's slide some cover for what they were up to or what they were doing in Dallas and Houston at the time. Yeah, it's all things that if you talk about them, it's just designed to make you sound like a crank, but it's like he can't say what he was doing because whether these are all possibilities

that he did nothing, that he had a tad involvement, that he hid the real killer's gun, that he personally did it, which I think is the most ridiculous thing. That's the least incredible one. Yeah, right. But no matter which one it is, if he says anything, you can start pulling at the yarn and unravel some of it.

And the point is to never unravel any of it. To even the thing that looks off that you know is off, things like, you know, the boats and the Bay of Pigs assassinations being codenamed Houston and Barbara, things like that to make you sound like an asshole when you just point to the fringes of it. That we all know are there.

We all know it's there. We all know there's something there, but there's not enough written down for you to definitively say, yeah, he fucking killed JFK. It's funny to say, I like saying it, but, you know, yeah. Yeah, because these people all communicate by like wasp telepathy. This is a collection of hand gestures and winks

and translucent vein in the temple robbing. Yeah, HW, HW is so interesting to me. And his life is so interesting to me, especially in the wake of Donald Trump. I think this is the perfect time to record this and look into this because I, have you guys, we're gonna talk about this in part two, HW the politician, but did you guys ever watch that 60 minutes interview

with HW in 1980 I posted? No, no, I haven't. It's very interesting because the questions they ask him are, hey, are you too nice to be the president? Yep, are you a wimp? What's with the wimp factor? And the whole wimp thing is, it ended up being kind of his undoing, but it was by his own design, right?

Yeah, it was by his own design. It's like, okay, my choices are people see me as the heartless killer who snuffed out American Camelot and a lifelong spook and God knows what else. Or I'm like a bit of a funny duddie. Yeah, oh yeah. What do I want? I like Brussels sprouts.

Yeah, and I think it's so interesting in the wake of Trump who is a fucking pussy, but goes the opposite direction. Like everyone goes the opposite direction of HW now where they are these evil fucking people, but also wooses. Also never would have been able to, yeah, fly naval combat missions to the Pacific in the 40s or pull the trigger on an American president. They make a big showing with, yeah,

Black Rifle Coffee Company or Open Carrying in Starbucks when really they're as pig-bellied and resentful and bitter and queenish as Trump is. Yeah. Yeah, everything degenerates over time. Before I get into Poppy's career after college, Matt, what was the thing about the circumstances surrounding the medal he received for valor

during World War II where like he bailed out of his plane before his crew could? Yeah, that's the deal is that, yeah, he was a bomber pilot and the plane got shot down and there was controversy for years that he basically let the guys go down. That he got out of it, just like, see you guys later. And he was their officer, right?

Like he was the commanding officer. Yes, he was the commanding officer. And he was first out of the door, right? First out the door, yes. Hope you go, hope you guys got an inner tube. Yeah. And then famously at the age of 90, he went skydiving in sort of a reenactment

of having to bail out of his plane after it getting blown up. If I did it by O.J. Sipson. All right, so let's move on to his post-collegiate life. Once he graduated Yale, Poppy, AKA HW, was immediately hired by a company called Dresser Industries, the SR Dresser Manufacturing Company. It was, okay, the SR Dresser Manufacturing Company

was a small but largely unexceptional firm but that found eager buyers in Prescott Bush's Yale friends, Roland and W. Avril Harriman, the sons of the railroad tycoon, E.H. Harriman, AKA the April family. And then they had recently set up a merchant bank to assist wealthy families in such endeavors. Dresser basically made its money

because it held the patents on two very valuable pieces of oil extraction technology. And their whole business model was not based on the idea that they would own or extract the oil themselves but they would have the copyright on the technology that you would need to extract the oil. And that they would have a monopoly on that. You don't get rich in the gold rush by getting gold,

you get it by selling shovels. But I have a little section to read on a dresser. It involves a little Uncle Magic. Hell yes. Uncle Neil, baby. Hiring decisions by the Bones men at the Harriman firm were presented as jolly and distinctly informal with club and family being prime qualifications.

The one Harriman partner, Knight Woolley, a Yale and Bones Conferre. Knight Woolley. Knight Woolley, yes. Of Prescott Bush's, tells it, Malin simply wandered into their offices at the precise moment they were deciding who would run the newly acquired dresser.

Malin was flushed from a recent six-month mountaineering holiday without- God damn. What he stopped in for a visit. Roland Harriman turned and pointed at Malin then uttered the words, dresser, dresser. Upon which Malin was escorted into the office of Prescott's father-in-law, George Herbert Walker,

then president of Harriman and Company for a pro-forbid job interview. Walker promptly installed Malin as president. Yeah, Neil Malin, who was known to HW as Uncle Neil, hired him in 1948. And after Prescott installed, Neil Malin at the helm of dresser industries. And as Felix said, Malin's primary credential

was that he was, quote, one of them. He was a Yalee and a Scully. No, yeah, that is, I want everyone to, like, everyone. We've got some people in the professional class who listen. You know, there's so much you probably have to go through for your job, right? Like, you probably have to go through 10 rounds of interviews, two stages of group interviews.

You have to like, I don't know, go hitchhiking with your supervisor to prove that you can solve problems. I don't know what you have to do. I haven't worked an actual job in like 10 years. But imagine if you could just go on vacation for six months, just because. And then you just, you wander in to visit

your dumb ass friends and they're like, hey, do you want to make like a million dollars a year? You're like, yeah, I guess. Cool life. Now. Yeah, really good rule. Now, here's the deal though. I mean, like, this is all around like

the American oil industry, which is of course a very strategic business for, quote, national security. It, you know, you need oil to have a navy, army, an air force and American oil had driven the American war machine during World War II. And like basically is one of the reasons, you know, America was able to win in World War II is its productive capacity and like

its endless supply of oil. However, by the end of World War II, America had basically like, we still had plenty of petroleum, but we had exhausted like most of the oil fields in America. We had involved like, I mean, not tapping it out completely, but like it involved a huge expenditure of America's own oil resources.

And so much so that Roosevelt's Secretary of the Interior and later his petroleum administer for the war warned in 1943 that, quote, if there should be a World War III, it would have to be fought with someone else's petroleum because the United States wouldn't have it. Who does have the petroleum? Saudi Arabia.

And this of course, you know, goes into the whole deal that FDR made with the Saudis, the Bitter Lake, Adam Curtis documentary goes into all of this after World War II, which was, you know, that set in place like the dominant American foreign policy towards the Middle East for basically from then up until now, which is that we provide cover

to let the Saudis do basically whatever they want in exchange for that we are the primary buyers for the Saudi crude reserves. Like Saudi crude. Like that we would have untrammeled access to Saudi crude in perpetuity and it would be on, like, you know, it would be a deal on our terms, but like basically we would always,

always provide cover for like the Saudi royal family and they could do whatever they want. IE, you know, proselytize fundamentalist Islam to the rest of the fucking Muslim world. Yeah, the different forms this deal is taking on is very interesting. And I hope one day someone writes a book just about the military hardware purchases.

I mean, John Dolan, the war nerd, has written very extensively about how Saudis, we get a little bit of a rebate for our weapon sales because the Saudis will buy highly expensive state-of-the-art American military technology with a fundamental understanding that the Saudi military alone could not hold it in an uprising.

That would have to be the Americans, but it's an insurance policy, it's an expensive insurance policy. Hey, you don't want this falling into the hands of Al Qaeda and the Arabian Peninsula or ISIS, do you? Okay, well, you're always gonna be at the ready. The, one of the more formative events for the modern relationship between the West and the Saudis

and the Saudis' understanding of their own kingdom was in the 70s when an uprising took the grand mosque in Mecca and Saudi troops were completely unable to retake it just from a ragtag group of assholes who thought their cousin was modding. They had to use French mercenaries, right? They had to use French, former French GIGN commandos. There is an urban legend that because non-Muslims

cannot enter the grand mosque, they forced the French convert to Islam before going and then they went back being Catholics after, but that's never been confirmed. I like to believe it, it's funny, but I don't know that that happened. But there was also a sort of a deal where Saudis were buying unusually high volumes of T-bills

during times of extensive American deficit spending. So there are, again, this is one of those things that isn't no one's gonna outright say it. Like no one who works at DOD or state is gonna go, hey, they're buying a bunch of fucking missiles that they have no intention of using and cannot defend just so it's an insurance policy, but hey, we're making out ahead,

or hey, they're buying our T-bills because we buy their oil, it's a rebate deal that we have. Yeah, yeah. But it's something, you notice something's going on. And you know, I mean, just to bring it into the present moment, for example, I mean, if you've ever wondered why the America would back to the hill Saudi Arabia's

genocidal war against Yemen over the Obama, Trump, and now potentially Biden administrations, I mean, I think it all goes back to essentially this deal that was made after World War II, where like in order for America to be a global military hegemon and to like, you know, stand as a bulwark against communism and prosecute the Cold War,

our empire needed unfettered access to Saudi oil. And that continues to this day. And that's why they can do things like carry out the worst ongoing war crime in the world with the full cooperation of the US military and government. So back to Dresser here. Dresser Industries was also known for providing covers for CIA agents and assets.

And HW goes to work for Dresser in 1948, but things get interesting when the Cold War really heats up in 1950 when North Korea invades the South. Now this is important because it caught the US intelligence community completely off guard and heads had to roll because it was a huge embarrassment for them. So who steps in?

Well, a man named Alan Dulles. We've already heard about his brother John Foster in his relationship to this story, but Alan Dulles becomes the direct deputy director of clandestine activities. And wouldn't you know it, he just happens to have had a decades long relationship with the Bush family prior to that.

Even as far back as World War I, when Dulles's uncle was serving as Secretary of State, Prescott's father, Samuel Bush, oversaw small arms manufacturing for the War Industries Board. And a young Alan Dulles played a crucial role in the fledgling intelligence services operations in Europe. Later, the families interacted regularly

as the Bush clan applied their trade and investment banking and the Dulles's in the law. So basically, the Bushes were the bankers and the Dulles's were the lawyers. And their relationship united those two sectors of American power. And they were the ones who knew how to get things done. They were the ones that they controlled the money

and they had the keys to all the doors through banking and the law. So Dulles, at the same time as Dulles is taking over all clandestine operations for the US intelligence state and national security state. Dresser Industries relocates to Dallas, which was becoming a rapidly becoming the center

of both the defense industry, but also new oil capital. This was like, you know, this was like the West Texas oil boom was minting these, like these new like titans of industry. And of course, Neil Malin was at the center of all of it, bringing together sort of these politically conservative like the elites of Dallas society, together with what was then a nonprofit group

called the Council on World Affairs. And Malin had been active in the Cleveland branch of that. It had been started in 1918. Basically, it was a localized equivalent of the Rockefeller backed Council on Foreign Relations, Council on Foreign Relations, the presidency of which Alan Dulles had just resigned to take his post at the CIA.

So in September, 1951, there was an organizing meeting at Malin's home, which featured a group of people in that meeting, which included Fred Florence, who was the founder of the Republic National Bank, whose Dallas office tower was a covert repository for CIA-connected ventures. There was a guy named T.E. Braniff, who was a pioneer of the airline industry

and a member of the Knights of Malta. Then there was Fred Wooten, who was an official at the First National Bank of Dallas, which would then later go on to employ H.W. Bush in the years between his tenure as CIA director and vice president, and then a guy named Colonel Robert G. Storey, who was later named as a liaison

between Texas law enforcement and the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of President Kennedy. This group backs Eisenhower for president, and George H.W. Bush is made Midland County chairman on the Eisen Nixon-Hauer campaigns in both 1952 and 1956. So, young George H.W. Bush finds himself sitting

at the nexus of basically the Eastern establishment, the incoming administration, and this huge new wealth created in West Texas oil. Ike becomes president, and the Dulles brothers cement their control over all of U.S. foreign policy. John Foster Dulles becomes Ike's secretary of state, and Alan Dulles becomes head of the CIA.

And guess what? Ike's treasury secretary, Robert B. Anderson, was a longtime member of the dresser industry's board of directors. Now, here's the thing, Eisenhower was a general. He was the top general of American forces in the European theater for World War II, I mean Operation Overlord, D-Day, that was all Eisenhower.

And the thing is about generals is that they like delegating authority. He did not want to be involved in the day-to-day grind of politics. So he was happy to sort of farm out a lot of these sort of functions of state to guys like the Dulles brothers. And sort of like the daily tasks of being president

were kind of boring to him, and was not seen as like his role as an executive to oversee every aspect of them. So what did they do with this authority being delegated to them? Guatemala and Iran. And of course, it's Mellon's Council of World Affairs that just was involved in a lot of this.

Basically, at the beginning of his administration, they sent 15 members on a three-month world tour for meetings with what the group characterized as, quote, responsible political and business leaders. After the group returned, Dulles came to visit with the Dallas Council chapter. And at the same time, the CIA was in the process of creating plausible deniability

for what would eventually become its efforts to topple unfriendly regimes like Arbenz and Guatemala and Mozadek and Iran. Here's the problem though. The CIA's charter explicitly prohibits any kind of domestic covert operations. So the way around that is you have to create a, you have to create an entire environment,

like an entire ecosystem of middlemen to support rebels in countries that are targeted for regime change. And during the early days of Dallas, of Dresser in Dallas, and then eventually Zapata Petroleum, Dulles was beginning to experiment with running these off-the-books operations. And companies like Dresser and then Zapata Petroleum

were like the perfect covers to not just run off-the-books operations, but to fund them as well. Zapata Petroleum is founded in 1953 with investment money from his uncle Herbie Bush, also Yale Skull and Bones, class of 1927. And just a quick note here about Uncle Herbie, he was instrumental in bringing others,

including Eugene Meyer, a Yale graduate and owner of the Washington Post. Meyer was one of a number of media titans who were friends with Prescott and fellow Skull and Bones member Henry Loose, founder of Time Magazine, and William Paley, who was head of CBS at the time. So like I said here, like this is bringing together,

like all these people went to the same schools and were part of the same secret society in it, and then would go on to be the heads of basically banking, like the legal profession, the media, and the intelligence community. And they all- Staten Island, Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx. So Felix, you wanna talk about Zapata Offshore

and how that worked? Zapata Offshore, also pending on audience, interesting hats coming soon. I've been informed I cannot be sued by the Bush crime family or Zapata successor corporations for my Zapata oil hats that I have made for my friends and family. So we'll see, but no, I think I may sell those soon.

I think I may sell those soon. But Zapata Offshoreing, it was an interesting group of guys. It was founded in George H.W. and Thomas DeVine, who we had mentioned earlier as the 27 year old CIA wonderkin who had retired. Yeah, he got all the intelligence. He just did it very quickly. Yeah, some guys are just like,

they just breeze through it, right? Yeah. Zapata was formed as, Offshoreing was formed as a subsidiary of Zapata Oil. George H.W. was the president of Zapata Offshoreing. Well, I mean, okay, so like Offshore drilling was a relatively, it was a newer technology and Zapata Offshore had a drilling rig called Scorpion

that they were able to move from the Gulf of Mexico to K-Sol Bank, which was a very remote island in the Bahamas that was crucially 54 miles north of Cuba. And the K-Sol Island had also recently been leased to Howard Hughes, who had his own long-standing CIA ties as well as what was known as his own private CIA. And these offshore platforms basically, here's how they worked,

George Bush would be given a list of the names of Cuban oil workers who wanted placement, who wanted jobs. And wouldn't you know it, all of those Cubans who got placed in jobs working for Zapata Offshore were connected to Operation Mongoose, which is the CIA program to overthrow Castro. Basically, the oil platforms were the perfect training.

They were like, they gave them jobs, covers, but also basically were like training camps for these Cubans to do raids on the Cuban homeland during like, right after Castro had come to power and called it Operation Mongoose. The other thing that Zapata did, and it was in the perfect business for this, like if you run an offshoring business,

you could obscure a lot of like transportation of goods, transportation of arms, transportation of people. It can look like anything. Logistics. But offshoring bills, yeah. They were a purchasing agent for the CIA, oftentimes. That it makes me think of, yeah, the boats in Bay of Pigs being named Barbara and Houston.

Again, like fucking weird coincidence, right? I mean, the thing is like the connection to Operation Mongoose here takes us back to that original J. Edgar Hoover memo that mentions a Mr. George Bush for the Central Intelligence Agency. What was that memo about? It was about, it was briefing them, the DIA and the CIA,

on the FBI's concerns about these anti-Castro Cubans and like the chance that they may, I don't know, go off books again and do something crazy, like I don't know, kill the president of the United States. And like that's the thing, it was like this is all connected to these off the books or operations in the Caribbean and Cuba in particular.

Now, of course, Fidel takes power in the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and what does he do? He declares himself a communist not long after that, but even before that, he begins expropriating the property of several large American firms, specifically agricultural and mineral. And like this gets into the idea

of like the sort of psychology of a lot of these guys too. Cause like when we talk about national security, what does that really mean? And for these guys, it means particularly anything in the Western hemisphere is ours. If you have a country that has resources or anything that we want or need, it's ours. It is Americas.

We control it, not you. And anything like what Castro did, they take it like these guys, they take it as a personal insult to them. It's like, it's like, there's an emotional psychological connection here to revolutions like Castro or governments like Arbenz or Mosaddek in Iran

that attempt to use the natural resources of their own countries for their own benefit, that nationalize them or run them in the way that America would if we had those companies for the benefit of their own people and their own government. That's why they have to go. And like these guys in the early CIA,

the people who like these skull and bonesy guys who fucking did all of these assassinations and coups, there is an emotional fucking part to this where they really regard it as kind of like an insult to them personally, like an attack not just on America, but on like their very conception of them, like of themselves, their own sort of self identity.

The idea that these countries could take what is rightfully ours from us just because it happens to be within their borders. It all goes back to jerking off in Geronimo School. It's the same act. It's the same thought behind it. It is the wasp as the rightful inheritor of the earth. Yep.

And all its corners. The earth tells me there is no sin. And just like, Felix, what you're saying earlier about them being basically a pay master for the CIA. This is quoting here from John Sherwood, who was chief of the CIA's anti-Cassar operations in the early 60s, has said, quote, Bush's company was used as a conduit for these funds

under the guise of oil business contracts. The major breakthrough was when we were able to, through Bush, to place people in Pemex, the big Mexican national oil corporations. And of course, Zapata's operations were just a pure continuation of the model created by dresser industries. It was like a one-to-one thing.

They were basically, I mean, that's the thing. They're basically the same company. They're doing the same thing. It's just a different name. And in Zapata, George Bush was running it rather than working for it. Just quoting here, it says here, they were innovative in borrowing from the in-house history

of dresser, which was basically one of the first companies to have to do this bold move of this innovative tax strategy that involved creating a separate company in the principality of Liechtenstein. The benefit here was that no American taxes had to be paid on international earnings until the money was returned to the United States, if it was returned to the United States at all.

And basically, the funds became such that they were not repatriated or they were out of sight of federal authorities. And basically, there was no effective way of knowing where that money went or for what purposes. And Zapata, as like the umbrella corporation, would just consist of a number of foreign corporations that were incorporated in each country

where these drilling rigs operated. And it was basically created by the tax department at Arthur Anderson. And the tax lawyers at Baker and Botts. Arthur Anderson, another longtime player in American evil. I mean, even going up to Enron in the fucking late 90s. I mean, these are the accounting firms that create ways for American firms

to not just hide profits from taxation, but to create these vast, vast flows of capital that are essentially exist in a black box and are unknown to anyone but the people involved. And lo and behold, who's involved? Yeah, people are getting rich off of it. But it's really just, it's all the United States government and intelligence communities.

Like that's what these corporations are at a certain level. They're allowed to make money. And like I said, a lot of people get rich off of them. But they are still basically fronts, especially in the oil business for the CIA. And what they wanna do, which is fund illegal wars, assassinations and fucking, yeah, coups wherever they want

because those countries have resources that we need and that we want. So, I mean, it's here where it sort of brings us up to 1963. And H.W. is saying, quote, he was somewhere in Texas on that fateful day unlike virtually every other adult who lived through it who could probably tell you what fucking pants and shirt they were wearing when they fucking found it.

At the time, he of course was campaigning for Senate. And this was like, at this time, Prescott Bush was a Senator up until 1962. And then in sort of a surprising move, a lot of people thought that he would, you know, hold that seat forever, but he announced that he would not seek reelection and was sort of getting out of politics

at exactly the same time that his son H.W. Bush was making a hard shift from the oil industry to politics in America. And he was running for Senate in Texas at the time of the Kennedy assassination. Now, keep in mind, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which is very much associated with John F. Kennedy and is one of the main reasons,

or at least speculated as being one of the main reasons for the Kennedy assassination is essentially blowback from the Bay of Pigs. The Bay of Pigs was an operation that was started under Eisenhower. And it was the brainchild of Alan Dulles. And it was basically given to Kennedy as he took office. And he initially, you know, signed off on it

because like the ball was already moving. When it failed, that really soured his relationship with the CIA and Alan Dulles in particular. He felt that he had been lied to by the CIA, who up until the Bay of Pigs was regarded as basically infallible and undefeated in American and sort of global history. And one of the big lies that Kennedy said

that he was bought into or that he had been sold by Alan Dulles was that America would not have to intervene very heavily at all. We would just have to like provide a staging ground for these exiles because as soon as they got there, of course, the Cuban people would rise up and join them and overthrow Castro and his government.

The natives rising up is a recurring theme in the career of George H.W. and George W. Bush. The uprising that never comes. This will deal with this later towards the twilight of the second episode. But of course, George H.W. Bush instructed the Shia of Iraq to rise up against Saddam Hussein, saying that Americans would provide air cover.

And then it was just like, oh, sorry, I had something to do that day. Oh, dip. And they got slaughtered by the thousands. And after the Bay of Pigs, Alan Dulles had to launch this basically a full court press in the media to shore up the agency's credentials and reputation. I mean, at the time, Kennedy was furious

and was quoted by advisors of saying that he wanted to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds within weeks of the Bay of Pigs disaster. And which left many people speculating about Alan Dulles's future. He eventually was fired by Kennedy. And one of the main reasons that is cited for this firing

is that in this media full court press, he went on, meet the press shortly after the Bay of Pigs invasion and basically blamed it on Kennedy for not backing up the exiles with like air support and military cover. He says that we weren't waiting for the people to rise up on TV. He said, we were waiting for quote,

something else that didn't materialize. So Kennedy felt deeply betrayed by these guys. And, you know, probably rightly so, is that like, you know, they were leaving him holding the bag for an operation that they had started long before Kennedy was even in office. And then as handed to him as a sure thing, day one and that he got into office.

And now it became like, you know, a signature disaster of his first term in office was this failed fucking invasion of Cuba, which like, you know, was a huge, hugely humiliating for America. Cause, you know, Cuba was a communist country less than 50 miles off America's border. And from here, like, you know,

you go back to our JFK episode. I mean, like it spins out from here. Our good friends, Brendan and Noah will be diving even deeper into this in season two of blowback, which is coming next year, which is going to be all about Cuba and the Kennedy assassination. Like that, that is the blowback.

If these guys and, you know, what happened after that? And like the CIA's attempts to reassert itself and, you know, Kennedy's perhaps involvement in trying to clip their wings maybe is possibly a reason that his head was blown off in Dallas. I'll just say here, Prescott Bush has been quoted as saying of the Kennedys, I have quote, never forgiven them

for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He's quoted that to many close friends. He wrote a letter to Alan Dulles' widow in 1969, which was discovered among Dulles' papers at Princeton University. That's where Prescott said, I've never forgiven them. You know, that is really prickish of those guys because they knew that the invasion

would not work without air cover. That was all built into it. But they also didn't want to commit, they didn't, they were worried that Kennedy wouldn't commit if he knew that. So they went with the old ask for, you know, just like go forward and then just assume that once it started, he would take the next logical step

to like, you know, recognize that he was committed now and send in the air cover. And instead he said, no, no, we're not gonna do that. And then they fucking hated him forever as like, they were trying to trick the guy and give him some fucking credit for not falling for it. They were mad at him forever for not falling for the trick that they, the trap they set for him.

It is like posting a sigh in the hospital today. So a girl will DM you and then calling the girl a cunt because she didn't DM you. Yeah. And of course, they think, they think, well, if he just got those bombs in there, we would have won, which, okay, buddy, sure. Yeah, not a foregone conclusion at all. So, I mean, like that brings us to,

yeah, November 1963 in Dallas, George H.W. Bush is running for Senator and he's running for Senator like, you know, at a time when like the Republican party like as a whole. And of course, like, you know, like I said, he had been a chair on the Eisenhower Nixon campaigns before that. But, you know, this was at a time when like the Republican

party knew that their political future was dependent on if they could break the South away from the Democrats and particularly the states of Florida and Texas and H.W. Bush running for Senate there was a crucial piece of that political effort. You know, JFK had been just elected in one of the, you know, thinnest margins of victory in American history, one that was, you know,

election that was probably stolen by the Chicago syndicate for on behalf of his father, Joe Kennedy III. You know, you could see all that and Martin Scorsese is the Irishman. But like, you know, the Republican party understood that it was like their future dependent on regaining the South and like sort of severing the South's tie

from the Democratic party, which was like historically, you know, the South Dixie was the Democratic party stronghold and like that's what the New Deal relied on and like that was like a source of their power. So, you know, he was campaigning all over Texas, possibly even in Dallas on the day of it. So the idea that he would be sort of unaware of the fact that Kennedy was in Dallas riding around

in that car with a fucking open top in 1963 because he knew that he had to campaign hard in Texas to win reelection and George H.W. Bush was, you know, forget any of the conspiracy aspects of it, just on the surface was a crucial part of the Republican effort to stop him from winning Texas and to regain the presidency and a control over the South. So again, the idea that he would be so reticent

to share any memories about what he was doing there at that time or seemingly be unaware of why he was there and why Kennedy was there at the time is another very weird thing. Another weird thing that came up was something that came out in 1988. And like this is another memo that surfaced from November 22nd, 1963, where,

and like basically this came out because something called the JFK Records Act was being proposed in late in George H.W. Bush's first term in his presidency because of things like, you know, a renewed American public's interest in the Kennedy assassination because of things like, you know, Oliver Stone's movie and, you know, like the expiration date on a lot of these sort of like

classifications running out. And, you know, knowing how many people close to him were, you know, very involved in this, George H.W. Bush had to let this JFK Records Act pass or else risk looking like out of touch with the public while he was trying to win reelection. And because of that record, that act, another memo was coughed up connecting George H.W. Bush

and Zapata Oil to the Kennedy assassination. And that is that basically almost immediately after the Kennedy assassination, George H.W. Bush phoned the CIA to state that he wanted it to be kept confidential, but he wanted to basically let them know that he in the weeks leading up to the Kennedy assassination, he had heard from another young Republican,

a guy named James Parrot, that he was basically bragging about wanting to kill Kennedy and claiming that they were going to do it in either Houston or Dallas soon. So he was basically ratting on another guy for possibly being involved with the Kennedy assassination. But here's another, here's another person. And like, this is like, I really have to be brief here

because, you know, we're running out of time and there is so much fucking more to discuss about this guy. But there was a guy named George de Morin Schilt who is a huge figure in the Kennedy assassination and has a very interesting connection to the George H.W. Bush and the Bush family. George de Morin Schilt is a Russian emigre

and wouldn't you know it, a petroleum geologist. And in 1976, when George H.W. Bush was director of the CIA, the agency received a letter from George, I'm gonna call him George de Morin shit from now on because, you know, I'm not gonna, Morin Schilt. Fucking roasted. George doodoo de shit. He wrote a letter directly to George H.W. Bush,

director of the CIA, pleading for his help. The letter says, maybe you will be able to bring a solution into the hopeless situation I find myself in. My wife and I find ourselves surrounded by some vigilantes, our phone bugged and we are being followed everywhere. Either FBI is involved in this or they do not want to accept my complaints.

We are driven to insanity by this situation. I tried to write stupidly and unsuccessfully about Lee H. Oswald and must have angered a lot of people. Could you do something to remove this net around us? This will be my last request for help and I will not annoy you anymore. His staff- And do it the sideways for him.

His staff assumed that this guy was a crank and asked if he knew him. And then wouldn't you know it, George H.W. Bush confirmed that he did and an official response said, I do know this man, DeMorenschild. I first met him in the early 40s. He was an uncle to my Andover roommate and later serviced in Dallas in the 50s maybe,

then surfaced when Oswald shot the prominence. He knew Oswald before the assassination of President Kennedy. I do not recall his role in all of this. Now, his connection to this guy is considerably more than the fact that he was an uncle to his old roommate at Andover. Basically George DeMorenschild and the whole Morenschild family

is a family that basically is like I said, they're Russian emigres who left Russia after the revolution and have been basically at this nexus of sort of a white Russian anti-communist, the oil industry and the CIA in exactly the same way that the Bush family is. It's just they have threads everywhere, but basically George himself is a character because him and his wife basically shepherded Oswald

and his Russian wife into this community in Dallas that was sort of the white Russian community there. Like it was like a hub of white Russian anti-communists who had like left the Soviet Union and settled in America. And lo and behold, a lot of them ended up in Dallas. And this is a very weird thing. He's a character in Dandelion's Libra. He's a fairly big character in that book

because like in the years from 1962 to 1963, he was probably the most influential person in Lee Harvey Oswald's life. Like I said, like he got him jobs. He was like socially like intimately involved with him and his wife. Like he looked after their baby and was like after Oswald was killed,

like they basically protected Oswald's wife from scrutiny and like gave her like the script to say that and like she was the one who was like, you know, other than the gun itself was the smoking gun of saying like, yeah, Oswald did it because of X, Y and Z. The weird thing about this is that like why would Oswald and his wife be shepherded into this like white Russian community after the fact that Oswald had defected

to the Soviet Union as a Marxist and was like going around New Orleans handing out like hands-off Cuba pamphlets. It's pretty weird. It's very odd. His wife was the daughter of a KGB colonel. That seems like it'd be awkward dinner conversation with all those anti-communist Ruskies.

And of course, DeMoran Schilt and his wife testified to the Warren commission, which spent more time with them than any other witnesses accepting Oswald's widow, Marina. They basically characterized him as a colorful and eccentric character, but steered away every time Moran Schilt recounted another name from the staggering list

of his influential friends and associates. In the end, the commission basically concluded that it was all coincidences and nothing more. By the way, who was the serving member on the Warren commission? Alan Dulles, the guy Kennedy had just fired. Again, seems pretty strange. Whether you want to chalk these up to all coincidences

or not, you could, but we're not in that business. We're in the business of innuendo. We are about slandering, and the beauty part is you cannot slander the dead. They can't sue you. It's awesome. I mean, there's just too much more about, just basically like George DeMoran Schilt's whole family,

like his father, was involved in George H.W. Bush's grandfather, and they were very influential in lobbying the government of Woodrow Wilson to get America involved in World War II. They were very influential in reopening. Gotta get those bonds paid back. They were very influential in reopening the oil fields in Azerbaijan and Baku, back to sort of like an American,

even after the Soviets had taken power. Talk about full circle there, my god. The coast did that too, I think. I mean, the Moran Schilt family is like a perfect sort of international mirror to the Bush family, in that they are these sort of zealig figures who just happen to be at the nexus of these major world events and are very influential in the oil

and intelligence community and the Cold War. There's just one thing here about George I need to share before we wrap it up. Okay, so yeah, before settling in Dallas, he was mainly known as, quote, an international businessman. But quoting from Baker here, the timing of his overseas ventures was remarkable.

Invariably, when he was passing through town, a covert or even overt operation appeared to be unfolding. An invasion, a coup, that sort of thing. For example, in 1961, as Exile Cubans and their CIA support team prepared for the Bay of Pigs invasion in Guatemala, George the Moran Schilt and his wife passed through Guatemala City on what they told friends

was a month-long walking tour of the Central American Ismets. Then the Moran Schilt appeared in Mexico on oil business just as a Soviet leader arrived on a similar mission, even happened to meet with the Communist official. In a third instance, they landed in Haiti shortly after before an unsuccessful coup against its president that the US had its fingerprints all over. And just one more thing here.

They also had a connection to William F. Buckley's family and the Venezuelan Pentepec oil firm, which was run by William F. Buckley's father, who of course, the Buckley boys, just like the Bushes, had been in skull and bones, and then William Buckley, like H.W., was a pansy wannabe CIA agent in South America as well. And probably, like George H.W. Bush,

William Buckley remained a CIA agent for his entire life. Oh, yeah. So, I mean, like I said here, there are so many, so many threads that lead the Bush family, the Malans, the Haramans, the Morgan Shelts, just so many of these families and like the people in them and their business associates and their fucking school days and everyone.

There are just so many threads that lead them into this like nexus of like the Cold War oil, until the CIA, anti-Castro exiles and like the Bay of Pigs, and then ultimately a bullet ripping through Kennedy's head on Dallas in 1963. Like my brain is pouring out of my ears, just trying to keep all of them together in my head, but I think that takes us basically up

until like the first major part of George H.W. Bush's career, which like I said, culminates with John F. Kennedy getting his head blown off in Dallas in 1963. And you know, to the extent that he was personally involved in it, I mean, just like, just consider the fact that like the day of it happening, he took it upon himself to officially rat on someone else for potentially threatening to kill the president.

And then when he became director of the CIA, got a personal letter from George himself saying, please help me. I foolishly talked about Oswald. Oh, by the way, a year after he sent that letter, George de Morgan's show committed suicide. Well, Bill O'Reilly was trying to go interview him. Oh, you're right.

Wow, I did not know that. No, I did not know that. Yeah, he told a lying story that he was knocking on the guy's door when he heard a shotgun go off and he blew his brains out, but he was like a young reporter and he was set to interview him on the day he killed himself.

Well, maybe there was no foul play and he just really didn't want to talk to Bill O'Reilly. I mean, totally fair. Very fair. That would be funny if it just all got cleared up. Like HW talked to Mammon and Moloch. They got it all straightened out. Like no one's going to bother his family.

And then like Bill O'Reilly just starts bothering him and he's like, well, guess I got to kill myself. Yeah, I don't want to have this conversation. This guy's so annoying. I don't want to talk to this splotchy Irish Sasquatch. Well, there you go. I mean, this is part one. The last thing he saw was just like a big fucking

gross finger pointing in his face going, you're being disingenuous. You're being disingenuous. Then just he just painted his wall with his brains. Yeah, blew his head off with a shotgun. That's probably because George HW people should wouldn't write back. You're right.

Dear Mr. Optu Good to call or write my fans. There is so much more, though, about the whole Morgan Schultz family that is just it broke my brain trying to follow all of these different connections. And I hope I've done an OK job of summarizing this incredibly dense book and all of the connections that Russ Baker seems to be intimating here. And again, take them for what they are.

The motivations for why someone or why these groups of people might want to kill Kennedy. I mean, there's a number of them you can pick from. None of them add up to anything bulletproof or any totally satisfactory explanation for what happened on that day or why Kennedy was killed. But I mean, it's interesting. And like I said, it just it does all

seem to come back to like oil, the CIA, and then also keep in mind the mafia as well and their whole the money that they had invested in Cuba. And how much Meyer Lansky himself was basically a point man for all American business in Cuba at the time, what they stand to what they stand to lose from Castro taking power in that country and what they stood to gain from it coming back under US control

is also pretty compelling. Santo Traficante, Jr., who is sort of the boss of the Tampa mob, the most important mafia zone, Florida, his last words were reputedly, we never should have done Kennedy. Take that as you will. I mean, I assume mob guys, you just have to figure they lie all the fucking time.

And that's the best lie to get out if you're on your way out. Like, oh, yeah, I killed a president. I absolutely. I mean, it raises an eyebrow, but at the same time, I totally can see Kennedy gets killed by Oswald, just like they said. And everyone in the mob is like, oh, holy frick, you see that?

And one guy is just like, yeah, yeah, we know what happened. And they're like, what? And he's like, ah, don't worry about it. And then they just all assume they get it because somebody wants to be a badass. That's the problem with the mafia connection to JFK is I believe there's something there.

But when someone is like, I did it, it's like, well, you're all lying. Yeah, you just lie all day. Like, there's just these guys sitting around smelling like pastrami and lying. And here's the thing, though, like the Kennedy assassination is always kind of a red herring because it is this singular event.

And people are obsessed with these unanswered questions about who did it and why or how many shots are fired. And it's all sort of minutia. And you can take or leave any number of theories or stories or explanations that one can tell about this. And we're telling a story about the Bush families. Like, if not their involvement in it, then there's certainly their proximity

to a lot of the threads that led up to that event. And here's the thing, though, it doesn't really matter whether you believe Russ Baker 100% or not. Because what he lays out here, which are matters of factual record, it doesn't really matter whether they were intimately involved with pulling the trigger on Kennedy or not. Or indeed, it may just be an astonishing array

of coincidences and names and people and associations that people are eager to read too much into. But even accepting that, that this is all just drivel and just vague intimations and guilt by association. I mean, the story about the Bush family, from one generation to the next, and HW's life in particular, is one that tells a very real story about how power works in America and how America, the American military

national security state, how it rules the world and how it governs itself in the years following World War II. Yeah, he is there for all of it. He is the cigarette smoking man. Well, there you go. I got it. We went along on this one. You should probably wrap it up here, but part two, as soon

as you can compile all of the documents, the research. Got to get all the documents. I think part two, we'll have to deal with Watergate, Iran, Contra, and the Gulf War. Yes. So there we go, guys. George HW Bush, Poppy, a life career part one. I got that.

Where's your Poppy, bro? I got that. Until next time, bye-bye. What do you think when people make fun of your language? Like, I get the dickens on Iran, or someone is in a deep doo-doo. You see it coming back. What do you think? I don't mind.

You got to be what you are. Generationally, kids, you have to be what you are in life. You don't have to style it, so you're into the latest fad or the latest thing. And I'm not going to change. Michael Kramer of New York Magazine has called it the wimp factor. You know Michael Kramer?

Yeah. He'll never play linebacker for the Chicago Bears. Have you ever seen him? George Will has said, the silly, unpleasant sound Bush is emitting as he traipses from one conservative gathering to another is a thin, tinny arse the sound of a lap dog. Anything you want to say to George Will? Just that he'll never play linebacker

for the Chicago Bears, have you ever seen him? I'll put my record out there with anybody. You know that I was shot down two months after my 20th birthday fighting for my country? I didn't detect any wimp factor there. Do you know that we had to sit, my wife and I, and watch a child wrenched from our hearts in six months of cancer, knowing she was going to die?

Little strength comes from that. You know that I've run agencies like the CIA and restored the morale out there by making tough decisions, moving people around, not jumping out trying to get credit. But if his complaint is that I'm loyal to this president, guilty as charged.