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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Alternet just published a new article by Russ Baker called “Obama Should Worry About the Bush Family Tentacles Undermining His Plans.” The piece has quickly become the most e-mailed essay on the website.
We encourage readers to continue e-mailing Baker’s article, and to start a discussion on how our ambitious new President can most effectively escape the pressures detailed in Family of Secrets.
With newspapers cutting back on their book review sections, much of the best feedback on Family of Secrets is coming from personal blogs.
At Blog4Brains.com, Stan Nodvik reviews the book, calling it “a must-read for those interested in preserving our democracy and its history.” The website Strangely Blogged calls Baker’s book “a useful read, especially for those who have not looked hard at the Bushes before.” And Undernews, the blog of The Progressive Review, says that “as we say goodbye to George Bush (at least until some prosecutor files charges against him), there is no better way to observe the occasion than to read Russ Baker’s new book, Family of Secrets.”
Russ Baker has a new article up at Huffington Post about the Bushes’ “lemon diversity,” and the Republicans’ latest cynical attempt to share in President Obama’s historical accomplishment. Timely reading.
Minneapolis: Hi Russ — Thanks for taking questions today. Maybe it’s just me, but I not only have “Bush fatigue,” I have “Bush goodbye fatigue.” Have we always had these endless valedictories and post-mortems when a president leaves office, or is this a special case?
Russ Baker: Well, how surprising is it, really, that the empty goodbye exercise seems to warrant more energy than digging into the real events of the administration itself? We are a country that loves its spectacles. This is nothing new.
Russ also appeared on Reuters TV for a news segment on the end of Bush’s presidency. You can watch that segment here.
“One of the most important books of the past ten years”—Gore Vidal
“A tour de force….Family of Secrets has made me rethink even those events I witnessed with my own eyes”—Dan Rather
“Russ Baker’s work stands out for its fierce independence, fact-based reporting, and concern for what matters most to our democracy…A lot of us look to Russ to tell us what we didn’t know”—Bill Moyers
“This is the book people will be mining for years to come”—David Margolick, Newsweek and Vanity Fair
“An investigative gem filled with juicy revelations”
--Sydney Schanberg, Pulitzer Prize winner, New York Times
Book News | web | 
February 17, 2009 12:51 pm | 
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