History Forum / General / General Topics / January 2004

The Washington Post      11 Jan 2004     SECTION: Book World; T01

HEADLINE: The Ruling Class;
A family saga of secrecy, oil money and privilege.

BYLINE: Review by Jonathan Yardley

AMERICAN DYNASTY:
Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush
By Kevin Phillips
Viking. 397 pp. $25.95

In this angry, devastating examination of "the House of Bush," Kevin
Phillips asks the question that seems to have occurred to no one else:
How did these people get so entitled? How is it that a family in no
way distinguished by genuine accomplishment, moral and/or political
conviction or exceptional intelligence has managed to lay claim as a
matter of right to the American presidency, and how is it -- this is
the real puzzler -- that the American people seem to have acquiesced
in this presumption? How did we manage to put ourselves in the hands
of a family that clearly believes it has dynastic stature, with all
the privileges and entitlements attendant thereto, and behaves
accordingly?

Phillips, an experienced political strategist and former White House
aide, is correct to say that what he calls the Bush "restoration" --
the election to the White House in 2000 of George W. Bush, only eight
years after the public's emphatic repudiation of his father, George
H.W. Bush -- is unprecedented in American history. The two Adams
presidents were elected a quarter-century apart and represented
different parties, the two Roosevelts were separated by two decades
and came from different branches of the family, and any Kennedy
dynastic aspirations were thwarted by bizarre twists of fate. Yet even
though the first Bush presidency was by any reasonable standard a
failure, the inner leadership of the Republican Party felt so beholden
to the first George Bush that it anointed his callow son and namesake
almost upon the moment he won the governorship of Texas and, hand in
glove with the big-money interests to which the Bushes have always
cozied up, effectively closed the 2000 nominating process to anyone
else.

The Bushes were fortunate, Phillips readily acknowledges, in having an
interregnum presided over by Bill Clinton, who corrupted the
presidency almost beyond imagination and thus made the public
inordinately receptive to the fundamentalist moralizing in which
George W. specializes. Phillips also acknowledges that the present
Bush presidency may well be an illegitimate one, given the
half-million-vote plurality won by Al Gore in 2000 and the exceedingly
suspect Supreme Court ruling that put George W. in the White House. If
this is indeed a dynasty -- or, perhaps more accurately, a family with
dynastic pretensions -- then it certainly looks as much like an
accidental one as like one created by public demand.

Any number of things could turn the "Bush dynasty" into yesterday's
news -- continued frustration in Iraq and the much-ballyhooed "War on
Terrorism," continued economic stagnation, increased popular
resentment over the appalling chasm between the super-rich few and the
struggling many, more evidence of corruption among the Bush family's
business cronies, not to mention events and/or catastrophes as yet
unseen -- and it is regrettable that Phillips does not confront this
more directly. We don't have an appointive presidency, and we don't
have a royal succession, at least not yet. The American people are not
nearly so stupid as the Bushes and their retinue obviously believe
them to be, and they haven't delivered their final verdict.

So Phillips's study is valuable less for what it says about the
altered American political landscape (though much of what it says
about that is astute) than for what it says about the Bushes
themselves. Tracing the family lineage through four generations --
beginning with the president's great-grandfathers, George Herbert
Walker and Samuel Prescott Bush, moving along to his grandfather,
Prescott Bush, then to his father and himself -- Phillips paints a
portrait that can only be deeply disturbing to anyone concerned about
how power is now gained and maintained in this country.

Apart from the differences already mentioned between the Bushes and
the Adamses, Roosevelts and Kennedys, one stands apart from and above
all others: The Bushes have nothing to commend them to the public save
rank ambition. Other than accumulating a certain amount of money and
achieving a measure of what passes for aristocratic social position in
this country, the Bushes have achieved nothing of distinction and
appear to believe in nothing except their own interests. "Duty and
public service do make cameo appearances in the Bush saga," Phillips
writes, "fulfilling the stern instructions on those New England [prep]
school walls. However, so do vanity, ambition and pretentiousness."
What Phillips mainly detects in the family's history is "consistent
ambition, rarely ameliorated by a particular cause or issues agenda,
[that] is hard to reconcile with the New England school mottoes of
duty, public service, and noblesse oblige."

The Bushes seem to have come away from all those years of privileged
schooling with two things: "a state of permanent adolescence" -- viz.,
the fondness of both Bush presidents for "pranks, initiations, oaths
of secrecy, inner sanctums and other rites of loyalty far into middle
age" -- and a "penchant for secrecy and apparent elimination of
records and documents." This last was learned on the campus of Yale
and in the hallowed chambers of Skull and Bones, that incubator of
preppy silliness, clubbiness and secrecy. Yale and Skull and Bones
were primary breeding grounds for the OSS, the spy agency of World War
II, and the CIA that supplanted it, and Phillips correctly argues that
the Skull and Bones world view is essential both to the Bush psyche
and to the family's history in public life, from George H.Walker right
through to George W.

"Over the years," Phillips writes, the family has had an intimate
involvement "with the mainstays of the twentieth-century American
national security state: finance, oil and energy, the federal
government, the so-called military industrial complex, and the CIA,
the National Security Agency, and the rest of the intelligence
community." Every effort is made to avoid accountability. The Bush
culture is one in which public action is decided in private and
conducted with as much secrecy as possible, with no real consultation
with the public and as little as possible with its representatives on
Capitol Hill: "to script arms sales, launch missile strikes, and order
invasions from Panama to the Persian Gulf." As Phillips writes:

"It is an extraordinary record. If there are other families who have
more fully epitomized and risen alongside the hundred-year emergence
of the U.S. military-industrial complex, the post-1945 national
security state and the 21st-century imperium, no one has identified
them. Certainly no other established a presidential dynasty."

The Bushes have always depended upon the kindness of others.
Phillips's description of the young George H.W. Bush makes the point
nicely: "lithe, athletic, handsome, personable, and ambitious --
always seeking friends and striding purposefully toward the approval
of authority figures able to bestow his next nomination or appointive
office." Bushes are "deal-makers, rain-makers, or, in the most recent
generations, influence brokers." They deal not in making things but in
letting money make money. "Investment drove the economy" is what seems
to be the closest they have to a familial conviction, "and what fueled
investment was tax advantage." This is "primarily the product of
upper-class bias rather than the expression of a coherent ideology."
Having (somewhat uncharacteristically) a bit of fun, Phillips writes:

"All in all, if presidential family connections were theme parks, Bush
World would be a sight to behold. Mideast banks tied to the CIA would
crowd alongside Florida S&Ls that once laundered money for the
Nicaraguan contras. Dozens of oil wells would run eternally without
finding oil, thanks to periodic cash deposits by old men wearing
Reagan-Bush buttons and smoking twenty-dollar cigars. Visitors to
'Prescott Bush's Tokyo' could try to make an investment deal without
falling into the clutches of the yakuza or Japanese mob."

It is a gloomy, even frightening picture: "global oil ventures,
national security, sophisticated investments, arms deals, the Skull
and Bones chic of covert operations, and committed support of
established business interests," now compounded by the "religious
impulses and motivations" that the born-again George W. brings to the
mix. It operates not in the free market its rhetoric prattles about,
but in "crony capitalism" that gives every advantage to the cronies
with enough capital to buy their way into the game. Crony capitalism
has turned the funding of American elections into both a joke and a
menace, and has made the public's business a matter of private
interest.

That this powerful argument has been made by Kevin Phillips should be
a measure of how seriously it should be taken. He is not an ideologue
of the left -- to the contrary, he has been identified with the
Republican Party for some three decades, though he now calls himself
an independent -- and he is not a conspiracy theorist; indeed he makes
plain at the outset that "we must be cautious here not to transmute
commercial relationships into . . . conspiracy theory." It is true
that in some instances his argument rests on circumstantial evidence
and in others (mostly involving the family's engagement with espionage
and secret arrangements) on conjecture. It is also true that at times
reading his dense prose can be an uphill battle. But American Dynasty
is an important, troubling book that should be read everywhere with
care, nowhere more so than in this city.
************************************************************

The New York Times  18  Jan 2004     Section 7; Page 10

HEADLINE: Family Lies

BYLINE: By Michael Oreskes

Kevin Phillips detects a pattern of secrecy and deception in four
generations of the Bushes.; Michael Oreskes is an assistant managing
editor of The Times.

AMERICAN DYNASTY
Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush.
By Kevin Phillips.
397 pp. New York: Viking. $25.95.

IF Howard Dean (or any other Democrat) is elected president of the
United States this year, he (or she) will owe a debt of gratitude to
Kevin Phillips. This may seem improbable. Phillips is, of course,
legendary for his blueprint of Republican hegemony, "The Emerging
Republican Majority," published in 1969. Based on the returns from the
1968 voting and previous presidential races, it described how the rise
of the Sun Belt and the suburbs, coupled with Democratic tone-deafness
on social issues, was leading to a generation of Republican
presidential dominance. The book was "respectfully dedicated" by
Phillips "to the emerging Republican majority and its two principal
architects: President Richard M. Nixon and Attorney General John N.
Mitchell." Even Watergate, which swept away his patrons, Nixon and
Mitchell (he worked for Mitchell), was not enough to redirect the
electoral flow Phillips had observed. In the years from 1968 to now,
the Republicans have won six of the nine presidential elections (or
five of eight, with one tie, if you prefer).

Yet across those years, Phillips, like so many Americans, has drifted
away from his partisan identification. He says he is now more of an
independent than a Republican, and his recent writing has focused in
various versions on the gap in America between rich and poor and the
ways it has been exacerbated, in his view, by the policies of Reagan
and the two Bushes. News outlets still like to label Phillips a
conservative. But his politics have certainly given more solace to the
intellectual left in recent years than to the governing right.

And now the split is personal.

"I didn't like the Bushes when I was involved in G.O.P. politics
before their two presidencies," he acknowledges at the end of his
latest book. "And now I better understand why." He is referring to the
333 preceding pages of "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and
the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush," a compendium of evils
that he says have been handed down for four generations in the Bush
family.

The book makes two basic and interlocking arguments. The first is that
the United States has entered a period of what Phillips calls dynastic
politics, in which the spouses and offspring of political figures are
picking up where their relatives left off, to the detriment of
democracy. The second is that the most important example of this
phenomenon is not the Kennedys but the Bushes, who, beginning with
George W. Bush's great-grandfathers, Samuel P. Bush and George H.
Walker, assembled wealth and power by exploiting ties to Wall Street,
arms merchants, the American intelligence apparatus and foreign
dictators including Hitler. That wealth and power, and those
connections, are why Bush is president today, Phillips says, and why
his policies are what they are. Phillips finds the family fingerprints
on everything from Bush's pursuit of Saddam Hussein to his leanings
toward the energy industry, which, in the web Phillips weaves, are
also related to each other.

"George W. Bush's behavior, far from being entirely his own product,
is rooted in the dynasty's four-generation evolution and concomitant
pattern of deception, dissimulation and disinformation," Phillips
writes. Oh, sure, he adds, there have been other presidents whose
relationship to the truth was erratic. He mentions Johnson, Nixon and
Clinton. "What makes the Bush pattern different, deeper and more
worrisome is that it has been almost a century in the making." A
reader is tempted to shake Phillips and say, aren't we all the
products of our forebears? Certainly Hillary argued quite forcefully
that Bill's imperfections were the result of his own family dynamic.
But that would be to skip the heart of the book. When Kevin Phillips
gets rolling, there is no one who makes more historical connections,
conclusory leaps and just plain old sweeping statements that transcend
the bounds of footnotes. They aren't always convincing, but they sure
are exciting.

Phillips argues that dynastic politics has risen in the land on the
force of two familiar societal ailments -- an infatuation with
celebrity and a campaign finance system that favors the established
and wealthy -- and one not so familiar tendency: a longing for
royalty. "National politics, in short, has begun to take on the aura
of a great family arena. Of the four wives of the major-party
presidential nominees in 1996 and 2000, two quickly gained U.S. Senate
seats: Hillary Clinton in 2000 and Elizabeth Dole in 2002. A third,
Tipper Gore, decided not to make a Senate bid in Tennessee," Phillips
says. "Other seats in the U.S. Senate, in the meantime, began to pass
more like membership in Britain's House of Lords." These include a
Chafee in his father's Senate seat in Rhode Island, a Kennedy in his
brother's seat in Massachusetts and a Dodd in his father's seat in
Connecticut. Both senators from New Hampshire are the sons of former
governors, he writes (he doesn't mention that a Daley sits in his
father's chair at City Hall in Chicago).

The ahistorical American reader should be warned that Phillips really
loves comparisons with the history of Britain and Continental Europe.
Everything from the Wars of the Roses to the return of Simeon II to
Bulgaria parades by. But while there may be reasons to avoid this
book, its erudition is not one of them. Most of the historical
analogies can be ignored without prejudice to his central case.+And
case is the word. For Phillips, a graduate of Harvard Law School, sets
out to build a case here. "If there are other families who have more
fully epitomized and risen alongside the hundred-year emergence of the
U.S. military-industrial complex, the post-1945 national security
state and the 21st-century imperium, no one has identified them," he
writes. "Certainly no other established a presidential dynasty." Lest
there be any misunderstanding, Phillips believes this rise is not just
an interesting and undertold tale but a record of deceit,
self-dealing, secrecy, crony capitalism and, perhaps worst of all, Ivy
League elitism.

Let it be clear what this book is not. Phillips's publisher has
wrapped it with a cover that seems to offer one of those fascinating
multigenerational sagas of an American family. The Presidents Bush
lean into each other smiling, while beneath are small photos of the
family patriarchs. But Phillips is not a writer of history. He is an
analyst of demographics and documents, voting patterns and capital
accumulation. This skill with data is what made "The Emerging
Republican Majority" so powerful. It makes this book feel off key.
Phillips seems more at home with numbers and connections than with the
motivations of men of power.

His tone is reminiscent of the muckrakers at the turn of the last
century. When Phillips says plutocracy, I hear Lincoln Steffens from
"The Shame of the Cities." And the ghost of Ida Tarbell smiles over
Phillips's shoulder as he traces in the New York City Directory of
Directors the interlocking directorates that put George H. Walker,
Prescott Bush, the Harrimans and the Rockefellers in control of
companies doing business with the Nazi Reich and the Soviet Union.
It's worth noting that Tarbell published her trustbusting history of
Standard Oil in 1904, three years after the strike in Texas that set
the gushers flowing that would ultimately fuel the rise of the Bush
dynasty.

Phillips is correct that we do not yet have a full-throated history of
the rise of the Bush family and that, given the election of two
presidents in 12 years, this is a worrisome gap in our understanding.
But he acknowledges that he has not done the research to write that:
"There are a few Bush cousins who might, in the right mood, be candid
-- mostly disgruntled grandchildren of George H. Walker, the old
buccaneer -- but in the end I did not travel that route." So what,
then, are the untempered assertions of this book based on?

"Besides my own background of many years in Republican politics,"
Phillips explains, he read a lot of books, newspaper articles, Web
sites and magazines. Readers can study the copious footnotes and form
their own judgments about the variable reliability of these secondary
sources. But what about Phillips's own relationship to the Bushes and
how it shapes the book? What were those experiences of many years in
Republican politics? He tells us only that in the 1960's he began to
develop a "distaste" for "what George H. W. Bush seemed to represent
-- a career built on support from a vague 'elite' rather than merit or
democratic selection." Beyond that, the reader will search in vain for
details of Phillips's evolving view of the Bushes, and that is a
shame. We are robbed both of whatever firsthand stories Phillips has
to tell us and of any way to judge the credibility of his animus. What
we are left with is a campaign dossier, full of fascinating items
worthy of election-year discussion. A cynical view would be that his
publisher knows that screeds sell (the best-seller list shows that the
buying of political books is as polarized as everything else in
politics). A more generous view is that he is trying to provoke the
kind of debate about the Bushes he believes we should have started
years ago.