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Little Bo Creep and the Pulling of Wool
By Eileen Smith
July 18, 2001 (APJP) -- Any bug on the wall of Bush family gatherings must surely witness a cacophony of hoo-hawing and knee slapping at the great fable they recently foisted on the American people -- the story of simple George.
It turns out that the story of W's boyhood days in dusty, dull Midland -- just a-ridin' his bicycle to the Roy Rogers matinees and a-playin' street games with the other kids -- isn't the whole story.
George spent summers herding sheep on a Scottish farm.
Wouldn't you think that the spinners and shapers would weave this bit of color into his biography? Weren't there life lessons learned as he pulled a lamb from the slobbering jaws of a wolf? Or perhaps he determined to do great things while watching the clouds form over the heath? Couldn't he have learned the value of the green earth and hard work and couldn't they have really, really milked the images? Wasn't there a photo of him in his little herder's pants with a staff and a couple of lambs leaning against his sturdy legs and a chorus of "Brigadoon" in his heart?
Why was this fairly important and definitely colorful part of his past omitted?
A little web surfing brings a clue to us.
The sheep farm in Perthshire, Scotland, belonged to a James Gammell. "Jimmy" was Scotland's most connected elitist financier, and an early partner in Zapata Oil. Zapata Oil, readers may know, is the early aggressive venture of George Herbert Walker Bush and his cronies, and reported to have had CIA involvement. "Operation Zapata" was also the CIA's code name for intelligence operations against Cuba.
Little George's first visit to Perthshire occurred in the same year that Fidel Castro seized power -- 1959. George was 13, and he delighted in the acceptance the Gammell family gave him, and recently told a London Times reporter about being mistaken by Texas tourists for a local lad:
"I was assigned to take a sheep from one pasture to
another and this tour bus stops and they all get out
and this woman says: 'Oh, look at the little
Scottish boy,' in this Texas accent," Mr Bush said
with a broad grin. “Of course, I kept my mouth shut
and gave them a little Scottish boy wave."
Adorable!
Isn't that a parable for George's political rise? He's delighted about being mistaken for a Scottish sheepherder, when in truth he was a little rich kid mixing with other little rich kids on the farm of the man who did bidness on a level with kings and queens and potentates, and when in truth the whole history of the Bushes in America is one of cronyism and predatory elitism, if not outright graft.
(Incidentally, the son of the Gammell family, Bill, turns out to have gone to school in Edinburgh with Tony Blair. Perhaps Blair and Bush played Scottish boy on the farm and there's a deeper explanation to Bush's joke about toothpaste?)
To understand why omitting this episode is important for Bush, it's instructive to take a quick look at the crowd his family travels with. Here are just two paragraphs from a long and detailed review:
The Bush family ties to the Lairds and Lords of
Scotland and England
Lazard Brothers was controlled by officials in the
British government. It was always the investment
bank of David Rockefeller. And, besides Meyer and
Walker, George Bush's other large investor in Bush-
Overbey was British Assets Trust, Ltd., an
investment company whose directors interlocked with
the management of companies associated with Lord
Kindersley, such as Hudson's Bay Company. The
chairman of British Assets Trust in 1956 was J.G.S.
Gammell in Edinburgh, Scotland, and in 1985 by
J.C.R. Inglis, a partner in Shepherd & Wedderburn,
WS, an Edinburgh law firm. Inglis was also a
director of The Royal Bank of Scotland Group,
Scottish Provident Institution for Mutual Life
Assurance, Edinburgh American Assets Trust and
Atlantic Assets Trust, as well as chairman of
European Assets, N.V., Gammell also had served as
director of The Royal Bank of Scotland Group, as
did such other notables as The Right Hon. Lord
Balfour of Burleigh, The Right Hon. Lord Clydesmuir
and The Right Hon. Lord Polwarth. Polwarth,
incidentally, began serving as a director of the
Halliburton Company, parent of Brown & Root, in 1974.
The Bush family continued to amass its fortune and
power from the British and Scottish sources named
above, as these sources introduced their financial
tentacles into Texas, and as George H.W. Bush and
Barbara drove that old red Studebaker into Houston.
Hoop de la! Dizzying, isn't it?
All that's left for us is to wonder what else the Bushes are leaving out.
Has there ever been such a poseur?
Copyright © 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, American Politics Journal Publications, Inc.
