[Peace-discuss] Fw: [NNSense] BUSH DYNASTY

[Lisa Chason]

By WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD REVIEW SERVICE

AMERICAN DYNASTY: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush

  By Kevin Phillips Viking. 397 pp. $25.95

  Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

  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' 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' 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.

  Jonathan Yardley can be reached at: yardley at washpost.com.
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