The Next Step
With your help, we can dig one level deeper. Family of Secrets has met with overwhelming approval and excitement. We’re being flooded by requests that we continue to excavate the truth about power in America and today’s world. And we intend to do just that. Meet www.whowhatwhy.org.
This investigative reporting website, founded and edited by Russ Baker, is non-commercial, non-partisan, and non-profit, meaning that our team can ask the tough questions and go where others fear to tread. However, such work is time-consuming and expensive. We simply cannot do it without your help. Please consider becoming a partner with Russ and his team by donating to WhoWhatWhy, which will re-launch at the end of this month with a brand-new design and daily content.
In order to thrive, we need hundreds or thousands of you to agree to support us through a modest monthly donation. (And one-time donations are certainly welcome.) Anything you invest in whowhatwhy.org and its Real News Project will be put to use immediately in unearthing the mysteries of the past, present, and immediate future.
The Harold Channer Show
Watch Russ Baker discuss his career as an investigative journalist in an hourlong interview with veteran talk show host Harold Channer:
The Lionel Show
Russ Baker appeared on Air America’s “Lionel Show” earlier today. That interview can be listened to at Air America’s website: Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.
Sign of the Times
Revelations detailed in Family of Secrets made their way to the front page of Sunday’s New York Times. In the article “John Dean’s Role at Issue in Nixon Tapes Feud,” Patricia Cohen covers the academic scandal surrounding Stanley Kutler’s omissions and elisions in his book-length compendium of the Nixon tapes, Abuse of Power.
Cohen writes:
[L]ongtime critics of his transcripts say Mr. Kutler deliberately edited the tapes in ways that painted a more benign portrait of a central figure in the drama, the conspirator-turned-star-witness, John W. Dean III, the White House counsel who told Nixon that Watergate had become a “cancer” on his presidency.
Behind the accusations are rival visions of Mr. Dean, who is seen by some as a flawed but ultimately courageous man reluctantly sucked into the scandal, and by others as a primary architect of the cover-up who saved himself by deflecting guilt.
Russ Baker is mentioned in the article as a prominent critic of Kutler, and chapters 10 and 11 of Family of Secrets provide the fullest accounting to date of Dean’s role in ousting Nixon, and of the discrepancies between the Nixon tapes and Kutler’s account of these specific conversations.
San Diego Weighs In
From Sunday’s San Diego Union-Tribune:
Eight years later and many of us are still wondering: How in the world did George W. Bush become president? How did Dubya, of all people, even reach a point where he could become president?
Partisan carping? Sue me. Better yet, read Russ Baker’s scathing “Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America” (Bloomsbury Press, 577 pages, $30).
Baker strongly argues that Bush’s destructive policies – lying us into war, sanctioning torture and illegal wiretapping, trashing the Constitution, to name just a few – are part and parcel of the family business. And that family business maintains contacts in and utilizes a web of intelligence agencies to work on behalf of the country’s elites: social, financial, industrial, military, etc.
Left-wing paranoia? Baker, a solid investigative journalist, works hard to back up his claims – a reader could choke on the complex, interwoven details in “Family of Secrets.” He’s a man on a mission, desperate to stop the “methods of stealth and manipulation that … reflect a deeper ill: the American public’s increasingly tenuous hold upon the levers of its own democracy.”