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Edited on Tue Feb-17-04 11:27 AM by ElsewheresDaughter
On the 20th July last year, 43 year old James H. Hatfield, journalist and author of 'Fortunate Son', a biography of George W. Bush, was found dead in his hotel room in Springdale, Arkansas, the victim of apparent suicide. Hatfield's story is tied to the book he wrote and, through it to the career of the President. Hatfield, a writer with a somewhat chequered past, wrote a biography of George W Bush, while Dubya was still Governor of Texas. Amongst a host of bald and shocking facts about him it contained the allegation that in 1972 Bush senior had arranged for a Texas judge to have his son's conviction for possession of cocaine expunged from the records, in return for which Junior performed works of public service. This last was already documented; the fact that he worked for a while in the early seventies in an outreach centre for teenagers in one of Dallas' poorest districts has often been touted by republican publicists eager to round off some of their leader's corners. Needless to say, it stands out like a sore thumb.
The cocaine charge is the most sensational allegation contained in Hatfield's book, but it's hardly the most disturbing. From engineering the seizure of other people's property under eminent domain laws for use by his Texas Rangers baseball team, to the millions he made in dubious insider stock swaps, to his peripheral connections to the BCCI scandal, Fortunate Son is a catalogue of sins. It is a portrait of a man who routinely uses political connections to further his business interests, and likewise uses his business connections to further his political career; to quote one of Jenny Holzer's truisms, "Abuse of power comes as no surprise".
That Bush was corrupt before his political career is similarly no surprise. After all, this is the man who took control of the world's biggest democracy in a bloodless putsch, and despite his sabre rattling and the popularity boost he's received courtesy of the War on Terrorism, the stink surrounding the demise of Enron is still the biggest news in town. Next to all that, Hatfield's allegations of a youthful drug misdemeanour seem like very small beer.
To preserve their anonymity, Hatfield left his sources for the drug story unattributed. It was an omission that was to cost him a great deal. After the story of Dubya's partying past broke on news website www.salon.com (it is important to note that Hatfield was not the first to make the allegation), his editors at St. Martins Press insisted that he include it in his book. The book was effectively already written and ready for the press at this point. According to Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media Studies at New York University, they instructed him to "put the story in a special afterword for maximum effect, pushing him to make the prose more lurid". After publication, amid a media firestorm and threats of possible lawsuits from the Bush campaign, St. Martin's press pressured Hatfield to reveal the identity of his confidential sources. He refused.
Less than a week after publication 70,000 copies of Fortunate Son were withdrawn and destroyed, despite the fact that the book was at #8 on Amazon's Top 100 within 72 hours of its publication and #30 on The New York Times hardcover non-fiction list. St. Martins Press promised to turn it into "furnace fodder".
Let's leave aside the fact that burning books is anathema to any democracy; this was a grotesque over-reaction. Bush's predecessor Clinton was shown no such favour when it came to allegations in the press about him. In Blinded by the Right - The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative published in March this year, David Brock, one of the hounds that ran his administration to ground, explicitly admits that there was a right wing press conspiracy to discredit Clinton long before the former President's philandering came to light. According to former Newsweek Journalist Robert Parry, "We've seen books written about Clinton that I think are essentially made up". Parry goes further, "If you're going to start burning every book that has in it some disputed allegation, we're going to burn every book in every library. I find that troubling. I find it even more troubling that the press has shown no concern about a book burning."
Importantly, the rumours of Bush's past cocaine are almost certainly not unfounded. In an April 1998 interview with Houston Public News reporter Toby Rogers, former President George Bush's Chief of Staff Michael C. Dannenhauer admitted that Bush "was out of control since college. There was cocaine use, lots of women, but the drinking was the worst". According to Dannenhauer, Bush's use of cocaine started "sometime before 1977". He also claimed former President Bush had told him that his son had experienced a few "lost weekends in Mexico". Bush Junior, no stranger to the taste of his own feet, seems to have corroborated these claims, blurting out at a press conference that he hadn't taken drugs "since 1974".
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