BOOK REVIEW
Reprinted with permission from THE NEW AMERICAN magazine, March 12, 1991

The Establishment's Man, by James J. Drummey, Appleton, WI: Western Islands, 1991. 192 pp., paperback.

That a conspiracy exists to merge the United States into a supranational political and economic new world order is no longer open to question. There is no mystery or secret about it, for it has long been openly advocated by its key promoters, from Walt W. Rostow to Zbigniew Brzezinski. The subject has been exhaustively researched and examined by a number of published authors. It is not Drummey's concern to prove this all over again; his intention is to inform the reader with chapter and verse that this freedom-destroying world order is George Bush's true goal and the only context within which his policies make sense.

Drummey handles his thesis with the skill that comes from 30 years as a political analyst and writer. The book begins by illustrating how George Bush fits the pattern of the least understood political paradox of our times -- a "conservative" Republican president who enacts the liberal-socialist agenda of his defeated Democratic opponent. Noting that this has been true also of Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, and Reagan, Drummey shatters the myth of their conservatism by showing how these Republicans, through their control and neutralization of their own party members in Congress, were able to push through far more liberal programs than any Democratic president, faced with Republican opposition, could have done.

Quoting Bush's own definition of himself as "a conservative who believes in the idea of limited government," Drummey exposes this widely believed claim as pure deception. The startling truth is that although George Bush, running on a strongly conservative platform, swept 40 states in a landslide victory in 1988, we are now getting his democratic opponent's agenda, including a ban on certain semiautomatic weapons, extremist environmental regulations, a moratorium on almost all off drilling off the California and Florida coasts, higher taxes, and accommodation of communist regimes abroad.

Drummey goes to the best authorities when he quotes former Dukakis campaign staffers who admit (one can imagine how ruefully):

For the past 17 months, President Bush has done what would have been unthinkable during his ... presidential campaign ... he has adopted almost verbatim major policy ideas from the campaign of Michael Dukakis. In other words, he has embraced ideas he once ridiculed so successfully when proposed by the "liberal Governor from Massachusetts."

Drummey also calls as a witness none other than Governor Mario Cuomo, himself an Establishment member, who made this astonishing observation: "If President Bush does a lot of things Democrats want done and does them well, why would you want to defeat him?"

In short, says Drummey, George Bush, like his Republican predecessors, has trashed his own conservative programs, often in the same breath with which he proclaimed his conservative credentials. Drummey says this has nothing to do with coopting the Democrats but everything to do with implementing the one-world objectives of the powerful Eastern Establishment, of which George Bush is the first bona fide member to occupy the White House.

Drummey moves on to eight chapters of meticulous documentation which leave little doubt that George Bush is, indeed, the "Establishment's man." He provides much needed insight into how the White House controls events for its own not-so-hidden purposes. Central to this control is, of course, personnel. Cabinet members, White House personnel, highly placed State Department officials, as well as other key officials in influential spots (including the military) are almost without exception members of the Establishment's Council on Foreign Relations and/or Trilateral Commission. Besides George Bush himself (who resigned when he ran for the vice-presidency in 1980), there are over 350 members of these two key organizations in the Bush Administration, including Dick Cheney, Nicholas Brady, Alan Greenspan, Richard Thornburgh, William Webster, Brent Scowcroft, Lawrence Eagleburger, Richard Darman, Carla Hills, and Colin Powell. In short, Bush has all bases covered. Not only are these Insiders chosen for the highest slots in our government, but anyone who stands in their way is ruthlessly purged. One must not think, however, that this would not have been the case had Dukakis won; his name showed up on the CFR membership list in June 1989.

Domestically, says Drummey, George Bush has pushed for bigger government, bigger deficits, more intervention. and increased control -- a socialist's dream. In no way can he claim to believe in limited constitutional government and decentralization of power. Instead, "he seems intent on extending not personal freedom, but rather the reach and power of the federal government into the fields of education, the arts, the environment, child care, health care, housing, agriculture, energy, transportation -- you name it! According to the Constitution, activity in any of those areas cannot be considered a legitimate function of the federal government."

Although Drummey shows our domestic predicament to be tragic enough, his chapters on Bush's foreign policy are a recital of perfidy that sickens the soul. In the case of the brutal communist police states of China and the Soviet Union, Bush has committed the American taxpayer to billions of tax dollars in aid and trade without a whisper of a quid pro quo. George Bush, says Drummey, is totally committed to ignoring the Red Chinese regime's crimes against the Chinese people. Nothing can deter him from his friendly support for Deng Xiaoping, the latest in the line of murderous dictators who (according to a 1971 Senate subcommittee report) have exterminated between 34 and 64 million of their own citizens. Drummey reminds us that "forced labor is the backbone of the Red Chinese economy ... at least 20 million Chinese ... are being worked to death in thousands of slave-labor camps .... "Yet Mr. Bush has granted their slave-masters Most Favored Nation trade status, which means it will cost them 40 percent less to send slave-labor products into the U.S. for dollars that will finance their continued tyranny.

But, says Drummey, if Bush's support for Deng is shocking, his massive aid, trade, and praise for the arch-criminal Gorbachev is nothing short of grotesque. This man, whom Bush called "the dynamic architect of Soviet reform" (although the only reform visible was the strengthening of Gorbachev's power), directed the massacre of over 500,000 Afghan civilians, continues this brutal communist repression from Kabul, maintains more than 2,000 slave-labor camps in the USSR with an estimated 10 million prisoners, continues to operate psychiatric prisons, has enlarged the dreaded KGB, supports Third World communist client states to the tune of $17 billion a year, and spends enormous amounts to upgrade the Soviet nuclear and strategic arsenal. After he was jeered by Russians watching the May Day parade in 1990, notes Drummey, Gorbachev pushed through a law making the insulting of a president a crime punishable by up to six years in prison.

Why, asks Drummey, would George Bush, who claims to be for freedom, so remarkably befriend a slave-master like Gorbachev? Why has he not lifted a finger to help the Baltics? Why has he chosen the side of the slave-masters in Red China and the communist terrorists in South Africa? The only answer that makes sense, says Drummey, is that Bush is carrying out the agenda of the Establishment to shape and control a global socialist economy.

Drummey covers George Bush's early years as well as his public career. The background he provides can't help but arouse speculation as to how selected young men are worked into the inner apparatus of the Establishment. Bush's early rhetoric was certainly conservative; he didn't sound like an Insider until his second term in the House in 1968. Yet the fact remains that George Bush was "to the Establishment born." This may help to explain why events seem to be moving more rapidly under Mr. Bush than under previous presidents.

With President Bush using his obscene war in the Gulf as an opportunity to speak openly for the first time about the coming new world order and the United Nations as an international peace-keeping force, we need all the truthful information we can get. James Drummey has done a magnificent job of providing it for us. He strips the cover off George Bush's "high moral principle," and exposes him as a despicable liar and deceiver, something quite different from the seemingly honest and sincere, plain-speaking fellow who shows up on our television screen.

-- JANE H. INGRAHAM