The Bush Family & The Nazis--Not

Jack Kemp has a short post at The American Thinker, quoting from Jonah Goldberg's new book Liberal Fascism on the claim that the Bush family helped finance the rise of the Nazis:

"As for the charge that George W. Bush's grandfather was a Nazi collaborator of some sort, put forward in Phillip's book "American Dynasty," Peter Schweizer demonstrates why this is such a bad-faith slander:

One of Phillip's most attention-grabbing chapters posits the theory that the Bushes were involved in the rise of Adolf Hitler. While he correctly notes that Brown Brothers Harriman, an investment-banking firm employing Prescott Bush and George H. Walker (George W. Bush's great-grandfather), investing in Nazi-era German companies, Phillips fails to note that it was Averell Harriman, later FDR's ambassador to Moscow and Truman's commerce secretary, who initiated these investments (and some in Soviet Russia) before either of the Bushes joined the firm. Prescott Bush did not oversee these investments: the reality is that he was involved almost exclusively in managing the firm's domestic portfolio. It was Harriman who largely managed the foreign investments and, accordingly, it was he who met German and Soviet leaders. (Peter Schweizer, "Kevin Phillip's Politics of Deceit," National Review Online, March 30, 2004,
www.nationalreview.com/comment/schweizer200403300907.asp
[accessed Jan. 23, 2007])'

In his article for The National Review, Schweizer looks at the sources Phillip's used:

Besides The Nation, the only sources he uses to make the case of the Bushes' secret CIA links is the Adamson Report (cited four times), a newsletter produced by one Bruce Adamson, a geologist who runs a crackpot website called ciajfk.com. Adamson apparently believes that the Bushes are implicated in the assassination of JFK "and tied directly and indirectly to the Diana accident and the crash of September 11, 2001."

...[For other claims,] Phillips also relies on J. H. Hatfield's Fortunate Son, a now-discredited book about George W. Bush which was pulled by its publisher. He also accepts the reporting of Victor Thorn, writing in Babelmagazine.com, concerning the Bushes' relationships to Saudi Arabia. (Thorn's other credits include the books, The New World Order Exposed and The Real Reason Jesus Was Crucified.)

Read about the other sources Phillip uses--I had no idea the research behind the claim was so sloppy.

Crossposted at Soccer Dad

Technorati Tag: President Bush and Nazi Germany.