Obituaries have transformed the terror that GHWB inflicted, depicting it as heroism.

By Greg Grandin, December 4, 2018, The Nation
Below are excerpts from
https://www.thenation.com/article/george-h-w-bush-icon-of-the-wasp-establishment-and-of-brutal-us-repression-in-the-third-world/

Raised in the shadow of legends, of a father (Prescott Bush) and two grandfathers (Samuel Bush and George H. Walker) who helped steer the expansive, epic era of Episcopalian capitalism—when American industry and politics had become interlocked with militarism—George H.W. Bush came into his own during the glory days of covert action in the Third World. This period ran from, say, the 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran through the Guatemala coup in 1954 and the Cuban Revolution in 1959 to the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba and the Bay of Pigs in 1961, until the eve of escalation in Vietnam.

Bush would serve for a year as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the mid-1970s, but, as Joseph McBride reported in The Nation in 1988, his involvement with the agency had started much earlier. In November 1963, shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover wrote a memo to the State Department describing the briefing of “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency” on the reaction to the assassination by anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Miami (it was feared by some that the exiles might take advantage of the chaotic situation by initiating an unauthorized raid against Cuba). McBride also cited a source with close connection to the intelligence community who confirmed that, as McBride put it, “Bush started working for the agency in 1960 or 1961, using his oil business as a cover for clandestine activities.”

According to Phillips, “from Yale’s class of 1943 alone, at least forty-two young men entered the intelligence services” (Bush attended from 1945 to 1948), and nearly every major player involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion had been in Yale’s secret Skull and Bones society. By the time Bush became director of the CIA in 1976, Phillips writes, “three generations of the Bush and Walker families already had some six decades of intelligence-related activity and experience under their belts,” which apparently also involved a Mexico-CIA “money line” that made its way into “the hands of the Watergate burglars.”

Bush’s family, despite its Nazi Entanglements, had done well under the New Deal. But H.W., out of Yale, made the jump to the libertarian rebel lands of West Texas, where “independent” Houston oilmen bridled at the privileged position of large petroleum companies. As the war in Vietnam accelerated the crisis within the Establishment, and as Third World nationalism began to threaten their economic interests, this new class of carbon extractors gained in political influence and injected an intensified ideological fervor into covert ops. 

Phillips places Bush’s Zapata drilling company (named, apparently, after the 1952 Marlon Brando film Viva Zapata!) at the center of this transformation, involved in both the 1954 Guatemala coup and the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. (According to Phillips, the Walker-Bush sugar holdings in Cuba took a hit, as Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government “seized the company’s lands, mills, and machinery.”)

Obituaries have transformed the terror that Bush inflicted—as head of the CIA, as Ronald Reagan’s vice president, and as president, on poor countries—depicting it as heroism. The invasion of Panama is given scant notice, and the first Gulf War is judged “just” But Bush helmed the CIA when it was working closely with Latin American death squads grouped under Operation Condor, naming Ted Shackley, implicated in terror operations in Southeast Asia and Latin America—including Vietnam’s Phoenix program and the 1973 coup against Chile’s Salvador Allende—the agency’s powerful associate deputy director for operations. Bush gave the go-head to the neoconservative Team B project, founded on the idea that, after the US debacle in Vietnam, the agency had become too soft on Third World nationalism.