Russ Baker Interview

An interview with Russ Baker the author of Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America. We'll talk to Baker about his recently published article "What Obama Is Up Against" — on the pressures Obama faces from the military-industrial-intelligence-finance sector and how that ties his hands on Afghan and Iraq. In Family of Secrets, Baker goes deep behind the scenes to deliver an arresting new look at George W. Bush, his father George H. W. Bush, their family, and the network of figures in intelligence, the military, finance, and oil who enabled the family’s rise to power. Baker’s exhaustive investigation reveals a remarkable clan whose hermetic secrecy and code of absolute loyalty have concealed a far-reaching role in recent history that transcends the Bush presidencies. Baker offers new insights into lingering mysteries — from the death of John F. Kennedy to Richard Nixon’s downfall in Watergate. Here, too, are insider accounts of the backroom strategizing, and outright deception, that resulted in George W. Bush’s electoral success. Throughout, Baker helps us understand why we have not known these things before. Russ Baker has written for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, the Nation, Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and Esquire, and served as Columbia Journalism Review contributing editor. In 2005, he founded the Real News Project, a nonprofit investigative news organization. His exclusive reporting on George W. Bush’s military record received a 2005 Deadline Club award. Recorded December 1, 2009