When I decided to inquire as to whether we had the whole story behind the rise of the Bush Dynasty and its most controversial member, I began coming upon previously-hidden facts that I found deeply disturbing. I would show my discoveries to friends high in the journalistic firmament. They would raise their eyebrows, fret a while, and then they would speak. First, they would tell me that I had terribly important information to impart. Then they would beseech me to keep it to myself.

Certain things, certain topics, I was told, are considered verboten by the establishment, including its liberal fringe. Publishing these things was simply going to be hazardous to my career. I would be attacked, or, worse, my five years of work would be studiously ignored.

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Russ Baker's new book, which I have not yet read, validates -- and I assume, greatly augments -- the points made in my 2004 volume American Dynasty about the Bush family's clandestine backstage role in the national intelligence community going back to World War One and its embrace of the Religious Right in 1986-87. The subtitle of American Dynasty - it rose to number 2 on the New York Times bestseller list -- was "Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush." To me, it was mind-boggling that the national media never picked up on easily confirmed data in Dynasty, for example the material in Appendix A which detailed some Walker-Bush family interlocking directorships in the 1914-1940 global netherworld of banking and armaments.

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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.

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Thanks to Greg, Craig and Greg (hey, I feel outnumbered in the "similar name department" ;-] ) for participating. All three are distinguished figures. I would like to particularly tip my hat to Greg Mitchell, who was kind enough to admit up front that he has not read Family of Secrets. From the relatively narrow comments of the others, it seems as if they have not either.

That's perfectly understandable. But our audience should know this: the book is not a polemic or a conventional analysis of the Bushes' politics in the normal framework of liberal vs. conservative. It is a voluminous work of investigative reporting--500+ pages of almost all new revelations about the Bushes, based on documents and interviews. The thrust of Family of Secrets is that our standard discussions of the Bushes fail to take into account a secret history. That secret history positions both George Bushes, H.W. and W., in the service of power elites in finance, resource extraction, and other industries, with a significant overlay of covert operations that have undermined democracy here and abroad. These activities long predated their rise to the presidency, and are therefore of enormous importance in understanding their political success.

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Without wading into the "true conservative" debate here (having not yet read the book) let me just offer these observations from my perch as something of a media critic.

There's little questions that whatever their true-blue (or rather true-red) conservative views and values, the press bent over backward to paint both Bushes as moderate, sensible, nice guy Republicans -- for most of George the Elder's time in the White House and for George II during the crucial 2000 election and then the early years of his reign.

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I've been quite critical of both Bush 41 and Bush 43, but I differ a bit from Russ in that I see very sharp differences between the two. More specifically, I see W's religiosity, his relationship with his father, and the roles of Rove and Cheney as much more than distractions.

For all his flaws, Bush 41 was a pragmatic realist (at times, a very brutal one), not an ideologue. And he hated the neocons. Brent Scowcroft, 41's best friend, saw the neocons swarming around "W" as early as '98, when Bush was still in Austin. He failed, of course, but I'm convinced he tried quite hard to stop the Iraq War--with 41's assent. That's a very real difference.

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In a Q&A with Washington Post readers to discuss his book Family of Secrets, Russ Baker responded to a question about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney by writing: "I would question whether either man was a real conservative. They are, more accurately, corporatists, and comfortable with tilting the playing field for their friends. Real conservatives are highly principled, and believe in a fair shake based on performance. What we have seen, time and again, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina response and elsewhere was that their friends and cronies got contracts, then ended up over-billing and doing a poor job."

Baker's reply, like his book as a whole, fails to adequately recognize the deep connections between the ideas of the modern conservative movement about governing and the countless failures of the Bush-Cheney administration. Those ideas to a large extent were developed and propagated for decades with the funding of the corporate interests and well-connected Republicans of the sort Baker fixates on. But it's neglecting a central part of the story to leave out the arguments that Bush, Cheney, and pretty much every conservative Republican made from Reagan onward about how government was the central problem, how privatizing and contracting out public services would lead to greater efficiencies, how government "bureaucrats" were inherently incompetent, how tax cuts for the rich would make everyone better off, how regulations kill jobs and should therefore be subverted, and how militarism would make the country safer. Russ refers in his opening post to those policies as "radical," but they also were long advocated by most mainstream conservatives.

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We don't understand our country's present and future because we don't understand the past--even the very recent past.

In trying to comprehend how the improbable world leader George W. Bush rose to the top and executed an array of radical policies, I began digging into the Bush family's history for clues. During my five years of research, I found that I had to re-examine the conventional wisdom and even my assumptions--not just about George W. Bush, but also about his father. Once I started taking a hard look at the particulars of both men's lesser-known activities over their lifetimes, I began finding that the public personas of the two men little reflected their true mindset or most enduring alliances.

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This week, Russ Baker joins us at Book Club for discussion of his book Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America. The book is a portrait of the presidencies of the two Bushes that questions the family's connections and insistence on secrecy. Baker is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Village Voice and Esquire.

From Baker's first post:

The two George Bushes, different as they appeared to be, both presided over administrations whose hallmark was extreme secrecy and the aggressive projection of military might to secure, among other goals, commercial opportunities for their friends and allies. This was no accident. As I make plain in Family of Secrets, the Bush policies were but the ultimate expression of a powerful if largely obscured current running through our country's history. Once we begin coming to terms with the real history of this country and the influences that shape it, we will have a better sense of the difficulties faced by Barack Obama, and the tremendous pressures upon him to continue serving those narrow interests, rather than the public good.

Joining the discussion are Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher and author of Why Obama Won; Greg Anrig, vice president of policy at The Century Foundation and author of The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing; and Craig Unger, author of The Fall of the House of Bush and House of Bush, House of Saud.