Very early in the campaign Bush issued a statement saying: "I am opposed to the Civil Rights bill now before the Senate." Not content with that, Bush proceeded immediately to tap the wellsprings of nullification and interposition: "Texas has a comparably good record in civil rights," he argued, "and I'm opposed to the Federal Government intervening further into State affairs and individual rights." At this point Bush claimed that his quarrel was not with the entire bill, but rather with two specific provisions, which he claimed had not been a part of the original draft, but which he hinted had been added to placate violent black extremists. According to his statement of March 17, "Bush pointed out that the original Kennedy Civil Rights bill in 1962 did not contain provisions either for a public accomodations section or a Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) section." "Then, after the hot, turbulent summer of 1962, when it became apparent that in order to get the Civil Rights leaders' support and votes in the 1964 election something more must be done, these two bad sections were added to the bill," according to Bush. "I suggest that these two provisions of the bill-- which I most heatedly oppose -- were politically motivated and are cynical in their approach to a most serious problem." But soon abandoned this hair-splitting approach, and on March 25 he told the Jaycees of Tyler "I oppose the entire bill." Bush explained later that beyond the public accomodations section and the Fair Employment Practices Committee, he found that "the most dangerous portions of the bill are those which make the Department of Justice the most powerful police force in the Nation and the Attorney General the Nation's most powerful police chief."

When Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts delivered his maiden speech to the Senate in April of 1964, he included a passage referring to the late John F. Kennedy, saying that the dead President had believed that "we should not hate, but love one another." Bush lashed out at Kennedy for what he called "unfair criticism of those who oppose the Civil Rights bill." In Bush's interpretation, "Kennedy's dramatic, almost tearful plea for passage of the bill presented all those who disagree with it as hate mongers." "The inference is clear," Bush said. "In other words, Ted Kennedy was saying that any one who opposes the present Civil Rights bill does so because there is hate in his heart. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is not a question of hate or love, but of Constitutionality." Bush "and other responsible conservatives" simply think that the bill is politically inspired. "This bill," Bush said, would make further inroads into the rights of individuals and the States, and even provide for the ultimate destruction of our trial by jury system. We simply feel that this type of class legislation, based on further federal control and intervention, is bad for the nation." "Bush said the Civil Rights problem is bascally a local problem, best left to the States to handle." Here surely was a respectable-sounding racism for the era of Selma and Bull Connor.

In New York about two years after the JFK assassination, I saw a poster on the street for an ad hoc "Free University" conducted in a loft on 14th Street. I attended an economics class taught by Lyndon LaRouche. He said the change then being pushed through our national strategy by Anglo-American financiers -- away from industry in the advanced countries, toward cheap labor, would lead to fascist policies and a systemic collapse. We agreed to form a philosophical/political association whose purpose would be to take the world out of the hands of that oligarchy.

We took the approach that the underlying axioms of twentieth century thought in science (Newtonian, Euclidian); literature, art and music (various types of existentialism and fascism); economics (all of it exclusively British imperialism), psychology and philosophy, and academia generally. were beyond bad. They represented an attack against classic humanist thought, against the most beautiful accomplishments of our civilization.

Our political organizing for a new renaissance and against that oligarchy, and our research and publishing operation, grew into a worldwide initiative.

For my part, around 1979 I read an atrocious piece in the New York Times celebrating Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton's killer, as a misunderstood romantic rebel. Wondering why the New York Establishment would side against such a pillar of the naton as Hamilton, I began reading the original sources - the works of Hmailton and other pro-republic historical leaders. I found that the historiography in our era did not simply misplace these historical figures on the political spectrum, but that the philosophical-political mental map of these former leaders was several orders of magnitude more profound and more pro-human than anything in the mental map of our era's available politics. There is a legacy and a tradition of republicanism, and republican leadership in science, art and statecraft, from Greece and Egypt and revived and expanded later, which has always been responsible for human progress.

As you may know, by 1986 the demand for our scalps from Henry Kissinger and others (the George Shultz and Felix Rohatyn breed of bankers) had grown to hysteria, with many thousands of press attacks at once. Kissinger wrote to the FBI that we were a national security threat. On October 6, 1986, 400 men from federal and state police agencies, with helicopter and armored car, raided our publishing offices in Leesburg, Virginia. Seven days after George Bush Sr. took office as President, LaRouche was imprisoned. A couple of dozen others were jailed, with sentences of up to 40-50 years. When Clinton came into office, LaRouche was released, and all the others were in time released as well.

I have a certain specific family background which helped spur me into historical and investigative work

In the early 1930s, my father, Jacob Chaitkin, a young, pro-Franklin Roosevelt, New York lawyer, took the cases of citizens who owned small bonds issued by private german coporations. These companies had stopped payment on the bonds under a decree of Hitler that had been arranged by the NY bankers'

representative John Foster Dulles personally in Berlin. My father argued that this was not a proper debt moratorium since it didn't aid poor debtors but only enriched Hitler's war preparations.

Many of the cases involved companies jointly owned by the Hitler government and the Brown Brothers Harriman bank, whose New York manager was Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush. My father won every case.

Because of his notoriety from these cases, the American Jewish Congress hired my father as the legal counsel and strategist for their Joint Boycott (with the American Federation of Labor) against Nazi Germany. This was initially a very big and effective boycott, with rallies at Madiosn Square Garden, etc.

At that time, the (German-British-U.S.) Kuhn Loeb Bank, run by the Warburg family, was issuing new bonds at lower interest, for the Hitler government. Max Warburg was then the largest stockholder in I.G. Farben, and the Warburgs worked with the Morgans, Harrimans and their senior political partner in the pro-Nazi faction, Bank of England Governor Montagu Norman.

The Warburgs' bank, Kuhn Loeb, ran the American Jewish Committee, which together with the B'nai B'rith (in which the NY TImes owners, the Sulzbergers, had great influence) held press conferences denouncing the anti-Hitler boycott, thus splitting the Jewish community. (The Times is better these days.)

So I got, in my upbringing, a family tradition of viewing Wall Street as the enemy, and a sense of the realities of power politics entirely outside the realm of what is put before the public.

On the JFK assassination: in a sense, it was the coup against the country, and specifically against the Franklin Roosevelt legacy, perpetrated by the authors of the murder, that led to our political initiative. I have done a certain amount of sharply original work around the Lincoln assassination, and our Executive Intelligence Review pioneered the work that helped propel the Garrison investigation on a fruitful international track.

Not much useful investigative work can be done in public affairs that does not reference a very long historical contest involving the participants and the underlying ideas on both sides of an event.

LaRouche's {Executive Intelligence Review} the 72 page weekly magazine publshed since the early 1970s, has a staff acknowleged by enemy and friend as the best array of intelligence and historical minds in private life, period. With many international bureaus, we collaborate with the pro-national leadership in many countries, and have been an increasingly influential leadership force for the FDR legacy (pro-peace, pro-industrial develpment) within the Democratic party and within the military and intelligence communties.

In that collaborative environment, before I wrote the historical sections of {George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, I had written {Treason in America: from Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman} a 600-page history of the struggle between the American nationalists and the tory-British-racist-imperialist faction from the Revolution to the Harriman-Dulles years. I am the history editor for Executive Intelligence Review.

The Bush biography came out in 1992 before Bush Sr. was re-nominated for President. The Bush forces worked hard to get the book exculded from book stores, and pushed it out of Borders where it was selling well. But it had already flooded into Texas, for the Republican convention, and into the hands of all nationally significant U.S. politicians. Though Bush won the nomination, the new odor of Hitlerism around the Bush family and their banker faction, from the book, added a certain edge to the decision of many influential Republicans and contributors, to sit on their hands in the 1992 election.

Watergate included the option of rapid steps in the direction of a dictatorship not so much of the military as of the intelligence community and the law enforcement agencies acting as executors of the will of the Wall Street circles indicated. The "Seven Days in May" overtone of Watergate, the more or less overt break with constitutional forms and rituals was never excluded. We must recall that the backdrop for Watergate had been provided first of all by the collapse of the international monetary system, as made official by Nixon's austerity decrees imposing a wage and price freeze starting on the fateful day of August 15, 1971. What followed was an attempt to run the entire US economy under the top-down diktat of the Pay Board and the Price Commission. This economic state of emergency was then compounded by the artificial oil shortages orchestrated by the companies of the international oil cartel during late 1973 and 1974, all in the wake of Kissinger's October 1973 Middle East War and the Arab oil boycott. In August, 1974, when Gerald Ford decided to make Nelson Rockefeller, and not George Bush, his vice-president designate, he was actively considering further executive orders to declare a new economic state of emergency. Such colossal economic dislocations had impelled the new Trilateral Commission and such theorists as Samuel Huntington to contemplate the inherent ungovernability of democracy and the necessity of beginning a transition towards forms that would prove more durable under conditions of aggravated econmomic breakdown. Ultimately, much to the disappointment of George Bush, whose timetable of boundless personal ambition and greed for power had once again surged ahead of what his peers of the ruling elite were prepared to accept, the perspectives for a more overtly dictatorial form of regime came to be embodied in the figure of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Skeptics will point to the humiliating announcement, made by President Ford within the context of his 1975 "Halloween massacre" reshuffle of key posts, that Rockefeller would not be considered for the 1976 vice presidential nomination. But Rockefeller, thanks to the efforts of Sarah Jane Moore and Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, each of whom attempted to assassinate Ford, had already come very close to the Oval Office on two separate occasions.

Ford himself was reputedly one of the most exalted Freemasons ever to occupy the presidency. Preponderant power during the last years of Nixon and during the Ford years was in any case exercised by Henry Kissinger, the de facto president, about whose pedigree and strategy something has been said above. The preserving of constitutional form and ritual as a hollow facade behind which to realize practices more and more dictatorial in their substance was a typical pragmatic adaptation made possible by the ability of the financiers to engineer the slow and gradual decline of the economy, avoiding upheavals of popular protest.

But in retrospect there can be no doubt that Watergate was a coup d'etat, a creeping and muffled cold coup in the institutions which has extended its consequences over almost two decades. The roots of the administrative fascism of the Reagan and Bush years are to be found in the institutional tremors and changed power relations set off by the banal farce of the Watergate break-in.

In the view of the dominant school of pro-regime journalism, the essence of the Watergate scandal lies in the illegal espionage and surveillance activity of the White House covert operations team, the so-called Plumbers, who are alleged to have been caught during an attempt to buglarize the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office building near the Potomac. The supposed goal of the break-in was to filch information and documents while planting bugs. According to the official legend of the Washington Post and Hollywood, Nixon and his retainers responded to the arrest of the buglars by compounding their original crime with obstruction of justice and all of the abuses of a coverup. Then the Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, dedicated partizans of the truth, blew the story open with the help of Woodward's mysterious source Deep Throat, setting into motion the investigation of the Senate committee under Sam Ervin, leading to impeachment proceedings by Rep. Peter Rodino's House Judiciary Committee which ultimately forced Nixon to resign.

The received interpretation of the salient facts of the Watergate episode is a fantastic and grotesque distortion of historical truth. Even the kind of cursory examination of the facts in Watergate which we can permit ourselves within the context of a biography of Watergate figure George Bush will reveal that the actions which caused the fall of Nixon cannot be reduced to the simplistic account just summarized. There is, for example, the question of the infiltration of the White House staff and of the Plumbers themselves by members and assets of the intelligence community whose loyalty was not to Nixon, but to the Anglo-American financier elite. This includes the presence among the Plumbers of numerous assets of the Central Intelligence Agency, and specifically of the CIA bureaus traditionally linked to George Bush, such as the Office of Security- Security Research Staff and the Miami Station with its pool of Cuban operatives.

The Plumbers were created at the demand of Henry Kissinger, who told Nixon that something had to be done to stop leaks in the wake of the "Pentagon Papers" affair of 1971. But if the Plumbers were called into existence by Kissinger, they were funded through a mechanism set up by Kissinger clone George Bush. A salient fact about the White House Special Investigations Unit (or Plumbers) of 1971-72 is that the money used to finance it was provided by George Bush's business partner and lifelong intimate friend, Bill Liedtke, the president of Pennzoil. Bill Liedtke was a regional finance chairman for the Nixon campaigns of 1968 and 1972, and he was one of the most successful, reportedly exceeding his quota by the largest margin among all his fellow regional chairmen. Liedtke says that he accepted this post as a personal favor to George Bush. In 1972, Bill Liedtke raised $700,000 in anonymous contributions, including what appears to have been a single contribution of $100,000 that was laundered through a bank account in Mexico. According to Harry Hurt, part of this money came from Bush's bosom crony Robert Mosbacher, now Secretary of Commerce. According to one account, "two days before a new law was scheduled to begin making anonymous donations illegal, the $700,000 in cash, checks, and securities was loaded into a briefcase at Pennzoil headquarters and picked up by a company vice president, who boarded a Washington- bound Pennzoil jet and delivered the funds to the Committee to Re- elect the President at ten o'clock that night."