Unfortunate Son

nsnews report

James H. Hatfield

St. Martins Press published a book by author James H. Hatfield called Fortunate Son. It is about the life of George W. Bush.

In the book, Hatfield charges that Bush was arrested in 1972 for cocaine possession. Why wasn’t the future President charged? Hatfield writes that Bush’s father used his political connections to have his son’s record expunged.

Soon after publication of Fortunate Son the Dallas Morning News received information about Hatfield’s criminal past.

The media jumped all over it and Hatfield’s reputation and credibility were ruined.

St. Martins Press promised to turn Fortunate Son into “furnace fodder.” It withdrew 70,000 copies from bookshelves and destroyed them.

PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH: "That book accused me of being anti-Semitic. It accused me of obstructing the justice system by going to a judge and having a narcotics charge dropped and have George do community service. It's a lie. It was a vicious lie."

Anybody believe that?

On the book jacket, Hatfield is identified as a freelance Texas journalist and businessman. But the publisher discovered that Hatfield is apparently a felon, convicted 11 years ago of hiring a hit man to kill a former boss.

Anybody believe that? Was Hatfield a felon all his life? So he spent 5 years in jail, who cares?

The serious crime is not the fact that Hatfield served 5 years in jail, even Martha Stewart is a convicted felon, the serious crime is that Hatfield's book was burned, and he made that clear when he said,

Burn is very important because in this country you don’t burn books, publishers are supposed to publish books. The major controversy surrounding the book when it first came out was my past. The book came out on a Tuesday and by Friday it was recalled because they found out I had a criminal history and so the publisher said they doubted my credibility at that point which didn’t make any sense because before that they said it was meticulously fact-checked, scrupulously corroborated, 54 pages of source notes. So you can’t say that one day and then go ok maybe he had a past but one doesn’t have anything to do with the other.

I think the title really sums it up “Fortunate Son” This is a guy that his entire life he succeeded because of who he is and his family heritage. He went to Andover because of his family connections. He went to Yale because of his father and his grandfather’s connections. Texas Law School turned him down but he got into Harvard because of family connections. He set out in the oil business in Midland back in the 70’s. And just because of his family’s name he got a lot of investors even though all his business is failing, he never was successful in the oil business. It was all bail outs and swap bills and that type of thing. And then he bought into the Texas Rangers for $600,000 while all the other investors paid millions, but, his father had just been elected President and they wanted him to be the managing general partner so he was essentially the face of the team. And he used that to propel his candidacy for governor. If he was George Smith, he would have never been elected governor because he was running against a very charismatic, popular person even outside Texas who was Ann Richards. And now, he has raised all this money. Nobody knows anything about the guy. He’s an empty suit. We’re starting to learn a little bit more about him now and, the money that’s been raised it’s because he’s George Bush and the son of a former President.

Does anybody seriously challenge George Bush's alleged cocaine use? Hatfield said;

Well I’m glad you asked that because there’s a new introduction to the re-issued book now from Softskull written by Nick Mamatas and Toby Rogers that they have an on the record interview with Michael Dannenhauer who is the elder Bush’s former chief of staff where he says that George W. had problems with alcohol and women and drugs back in the 70’s. And I quote “.lost weekends in Mexico” and the mainstream press has kinda glossed over that since the book’s come back out. Cause they said “give us some hard proof,” now we got hard proof, we got a former chief of staff of the elder Bush on there, who’s also a family friend and certainly knows his history. Nobody wants to talk about it.

These are the questions that Hatfield was asking:

Why does the presidential frontrunner and I’m not sure he’s the frontrunner now, but why don’t he talk about his past? And there’s been lots of books too that have been written that were just pure junk, pure fabrications about Clinton and they were never pulled off the shelves, they were never recalled and I can cite one by Aldridge I mean just about every reviewer in this country said it was horse hockey, but they pulled mine because there was a lot of pressure to do it.

Sounds like the answers were all censored, and Hatfield made that quite obvious when he said;

It was censored. It was censored, plain and simple and we don’t do that in this country. We don’t censor people because they wanna talk about the truth. When I was doing promotions for the book originally, the publicist at St. Martin’s told me that the reason we would get any publicity-—everybody was backing away, the AP didn’t even wanna carry it over the wire services. The book was coming out and made allegations. They weren’t telling the story they were just alleging what was in the book. AP wouldn’t cover it. So the publicist said “Jim here’s the problem, the Bush people are going around to everybody and saying "if you even report anything on this book, when we get to the White House,” not if we get to the White House, "when we get to the White House, you’re gonna find your butt sitting outside on a folding chair outside the press room and somebody else is gonna get the story. And it sure appeared that way. Because I’ll tell you we didn’t get any press coverage that week. The press coverage we got is because everything came out on me and then all of a sudden we got a controversy. I got em their press.

On July 18, 2001, James Hatfield's body was found by a hotel housekeeper in room 312 at a Days Inn in Springdale, Arkansas, an apparent suicide by drug overdose. Nice irony.

  

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