Family of Secrets

We Call Upon the Author

On Saturday March 14 at 5:00PM Eastern time, Russ Baker will be participating in the Firedoglake Book Salon, hosted by Marcy “Emptywheel” Wheeler.

We invite all readers to take part in this live chat with the author.

Russ Baker in Austin

Russ Baker will be taking Family of Secrets on the road for an appearance at BookPeople in Austin, Texas on March 24 at 7pm. Russ will be signing copies, answering questions, and reading from the book.

If you would like to bring Russ Baker to your hometown, send an e-mail to info@familyofsecrets.com.

Gore Vidal Has Something to Say

“Never pass up the opportunity to have sex or appear on television,” the eminent historian and novelist Gore Vidal once said. Living up to his own dictum, here’s Gore Vidal appearing on C-SPAN’s Book TV from the Key West Literary Conference. He has some kind things to say about Family of Secrets, beginning at about the four-minute mark:

There’s a wonderful book, by the way, I’m reading called Family of Secrets by…Russ Baker. He spent many years on it. And it’s a family — forgive me, Bushes and Bushettes — a family of criminals. Why they’re not all in jail I don’t know. If I seem a little dazed, I’ve been reading about their crimes, and proposed crimes, and how they got away with it.

High Praise

Over at BlogCritics Magazine, Jordan Richardson calls Family of Secrets “extraordinarily startling”:

While the Bush Dynasty rushes to paint a coat of golden gloss over Dubya’s “legacy,” this author and this book pushes for the truth, careful examination of the facts, fastidious criticism, and an exploration of one of the most compelling and important political dynasties in American history.

Right, left, centre, or slightly off-kilter, Russ Baker’s Family of Secrets has a story to tell that is continuously mesmerizing and, at times, extraordinarily startling.

Left, Right, and Center

Enthusiasm for Family of Secrets is coming from all across the political spectrum, from liberal blogs and establishment newspapers to right-leaning publications eager to discover the extent of the Bushes’ effect on the Republican party.

Today, listen to Russ Baker on The Lew Rockwell Show, where he discusses “the looting Bush family” with the Libertarian talk show host. (Digg here.)

When it comes to digging up answers about the recent past, we may indeed be living in a post-partisan era.

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.com.

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.com and its Real News Project will be put to use immediately in unearthing the mysteries of the past, present, and immediate future.

Click here now!

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.”