Like Greg Mitchell, I plead guilty to not having read Russ's book yet--and that inevitably limits whatever I can add to the discourse. Regardless, I have no doubts that Bush senior's operational experience with the CIA went beyond his service in 1976 as DCI. Many years ago I co-wrote a piece in The New Yorker with Murray Waas that showed how when then Vice-President Bush was on a widely heralded "peace" mission to the Middle East in 1986, he secretly relayed operational military intelligence to none other than Saddam Hussein. At the time, Iran was balking at an arms for hostages deal because they didn't need any weapons. Bush and William Casey figured out that Iran might change its mind if Saddam bombed the hell out of them--and knew what the right targets should be. In other words, Vice-President George H.W. Bush had gone undercover as an intelligence operative.

In addition, I have no reason to question Russ's reporting on Bush 41's other intelligence ties. But I'm not clear as to what it all adds up to--especially when it comes to Bush senior's links to George de Mohrenschildt, etc. The JFK assassination is so explosive that any ties inevitably become extraordinarily sensational. What do they really mean? Just asking.

On the issue of Bush 43 and the Christian Right, I'm also sure, as Russ reports, that "the Bushes were receiving memos from a religious adviser on the need to prove one's bona fides to the fast-growing religious right bloc." (I'm curious, Russ--is the adviser in question Doug Wead?) But that doesn't mean W manufactured his evangelicalism for purely political reasons. Bush himself claims he was converted in 1985 by Billy Graham. But Graham had no memory whatsoever of that, and I interviewed a preacher named Arthur Blessitt, and members of Bush's prayer group who recall that Blessitt had come to Midland in1984 and converted Bush. [In his campaign autobiography, I suspect W put Graham's name on the conversion because Graham was a more respectable figure to the electorate than Blessitt, a hippiesque preacher of sorts who walked around the world, to hundreds of countries, with the cross of Jesus on his back.].

Ultimately, of course, none of us can know what was going on in Bush's mind--how legitimate his conversion was. But, as the 1988 presidential campaign neared, Douglas Wead, VP Bush's liaison to the evangelicals, was deeply concerned about 41's relationship(or lack of one) to evangelicals. Wead had begun writing campaign memos to VP Bush about the need for strong ties to evangelicals, and, as I report in The Fall of the House of Bush, unbeknownst to Wead, an evangelist himself, VP Bush had begun forwarding the memos to his son. In March of 1987, Wead met with W for the first time and began to use him as a key campaign operative.

As the 1988 campaign got underway, for the first time in his life, W actually performed a useful task for the family. Mickey Herskowitz, a Houston sportswriter and Bush family friend told me that until then Bush 41 said "Jeb would be the one in the family who would choose politics. Jeb, he felt, had the political gifts." This rift between 41 and 43 was deep and very, very real. But now that he was liaison to the Christian Right and playing a key role in the campaign, W was suddenly becoming a contender to be the first son.

In addition, whatever went on in the mind of W, there's no question that he came across to evangelicals as authentic and his father didn't. I interviewed not just members of W's Bible study group in Midland, but Falwell, Tim LaHaye and many other figures on the evangelical right. Yes, Karl Rove went to town with this and got unbelievable political mileage out of it. Yes, it became an elemental part of their political calculus. But I think because liberals and secularists often dismiss this stuff as phony, we underestimate its political power.