Free Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years by Russ Baker

Bones (along with David McCullough, the noted biographer of Harry Truman and John Adams). Ray Walker eventually became a psychotherapist in Vermont and a quiet critic of Bush-Walker politics and values. Gow, however, was captivated, and served increasingly as a soldier for the Bush clan.
     
    Gow’s recruitment by the Bushes illustrates the kind of opportunities that come to those of the “right sort” and possessed of the appropriate discretion. By his own account, Gow was plodding along in an unremarkable career at the Norton Company, a grinding-wheel firm run by his father. Then, out of the blue, he received a call from Ray Walker’s father, George Herbert Walker Jr., a.k.a. Poppy’s “Uncle Herbie.” Uncle Herbie, as a key figure behind Zapata, believed that Gow was exactly the person for a new venture, Champlain-Zapata, a partnership to manufacture machines for molding expandable polystyrene.
     
    Gow possessed no apparent qualifications for the job, but Herbie insisted he was just right for it. Gow’s memoir recounts the company’s efforts to produce four different products, all without success. These included a plastic box for packaging berries that was canceled when Gow realized the box caused the berries to rot faster. This, Gow would drolly note, taught him to “think outside the box.”
     
    By investing in a risky polystyrene enterprise at a time when the parent company was not doing well, and entrusting it to the inexperienced Gow, Poppy Bush and his uncle revealed a fundamental illogic that seems to have run through the entire venture. In reality, not much could be said about Gow’s business abilities besides the fact that he was an amiable fellow and a “good man”—Scottish roots, Yale, Skull and Bones, old-line WASPy family, longtime Bush ties. He could be trusted to put the best spin on things and keep his mouth shut. (Even his former roommate Ray Walker laughed when asked whether Gow could have been seen as formidable.)
     
    In 1961, Gow, still struggling at Champlain-Zapata, got another call from Uncle Herbie Walker. This time the latter proposed a promotion: Gow would go to Texas to work as an executive for Poppy at Zapata Offshore, with attractive stock options. “Even though I was perhaps less qualified to be a Financial Vice President than I was to do any of the other jobs, Herbie, particularly, convinced me I could do it . . . George [was] very persuasive that I should come to Houston,” he writes.
     
    An embodiment of the Peter principle, in which individuals rise to the limits of their competence and then go higher, Gow continued to be promoted. “When I first arrived at Zapata Offshore, the man who had been the controller of the company quit . . . George suggested that I might be able to run all the accounting, controllership and financial functions with the assistance of two ladies who made the entries in the accounting department. Neither of these ladies had a great understanding of why they were making their entries. I had only taken one accounting course at Yale . . . I really did not know what a financial vice president of a company was supposed to do.” 54
     
    Even when Poppy Bush ran things, there was something fishy going on— literally. “When George Bush was head of Zapata,” Gow says in his memoir, “I had proposed to him that it would be useful for us to diversify into other profitable areas in the ocean. One of these might be the raising of fish. George made an arrangement with Texas A&M University to give us the use of a biological facility that A&M had on Galveston Bay. I was given the additional duty of Director of Marine Biological Research.”
     
    The tone of the venture is suggested in this anecdote from Gow:
     
One day, George came into my office and asked me to make a presentation for a bank loan where Zapata Offshore would borrow $5,200,000, more than its entire net worth at the time . . . I went to the bank, made the presentation, and was told that we