A BookPage Notable Title
A former Nixon White House strategist, Phillips details the making of the Bush family dynasty across four generations, documenting how it has exemplified many of the growing trends in American political life and how it has touched all the major "Establishment" bases. Phillips is the bestselling author of "The Politics of the Rich and Poor" and "Wealth and Democracy."

Introduction

Concern about a U.S. dynastic presidency first emerged in 2000, prompted by skeptics of the Bush succession, as well as by amateur historians unnerved by analogies to the seventeenth-century English Stuart and nineteenth-century French Bourbon restorations. The topic gained force and more widespread credibility when the 2002 elections confirmed George W. Bush’s popularity and when the war of early spring 2003 displayed his personal commitment to resuming his father’s unfinished combat with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Controversial wars and geopolitical ambitions, after all, have frequently originated as dynastic ambitions.

Other institutional aspects of a family-based presidency warrant national attention. Dynasties tend to show continuities of policy and interest-group bias—in the case of the Bushes, favoritism toward the energy sector, defense industries, the Pentagon, and the CIA, as well as insistence on tax breaks for the investor class and upper-income groups. By inauguration day of 2001, Houston-based Enron had a relationship with the Bush clan going back a decade and a half. Families restored to power also have a history of seeking revenge against old foes as well as recalling longtime loyalists and retainers. George W. Bush’s record has included retiring such taunters of his father as Texas governor Ann Richards (in 1994) and House Speaker Newt Gingrich (Bush helped to force him out after the 1998 elections) and appointing former officials dating back not just to his father’s term but to the Ford administration of 1974—76, a virtual incubator of the Republican Party’s Bush faction.

This dynasticism was hardly a phenomenon unique to the United States. In the first few years of the twenty-first century, the restoration of old European royal houses was discussed in Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Italy. As in the United States, the principals were political conservatives.

Another questionable aspect of dynastic control is the effect of biological inheritance. History is all too familiar with hereditary traits like the Hapsburg chin and the Tudor temper. Some pundits have queried whether heredity might likewise explain certain behaviors shared by the two Bush presidents—frenetic activity, scrambled speech, the hint of dyslexic arrangements of thought. Although the press has been reticent to pursue such matters, they do have a genuine relevance. Three, perhaps four, generations of Bushes have displayed great capacities for remembering names, faces, and statistics. Dallas News reporter Bill Minutaglio, a biographer of the younger Bush, discovered that George H. W. Bush “went so far as to tell his spokesman Marlin Fitzwater to gather together the photographs of the Washington press corps so he could memorize all their names; the Bush men were always startlingly better than anyone else at memorizing names” At the same time, both father and son have shown little talent for conceptualization or abstraction. Is it a coincidence? Dynasty with its subordination of individual achievement to gene pools and bloodlines, always involves a gamble on the nuances of heredity.

In the United States, as we will see, the twentieth-century rise of the Bush family was built on the five pillars of American global sway: the international reach of U.S. investment banking, the emerging giantism of the military-industrial complex, the ballooning of the CIA and kindred intelligence operations, the drive for U.S. control of global oil supplies, and a close alliance with Britain and the English-speaking community. This century of upward momentum brought a sequence of controversies, albeit ones that never gained critical mass—such as the exposure in 1942 of Prescott Bush’s corporate directorship links to wartime Germany, which harked back to overambitious 1920s investment banking; the Bush family’s longtime involvement with global armaments and the military-industrial complex; and a web of close connections to the CIA, which began decades before George Bush’s brief CIA directorship in 1976. Threads like these may not weigh heavily on individual presidencies; they are many times more troubling when they run through several generations of a dynasty.

We must be cautious here not to transmute commercial relationships into a latter-day conspiracy theory a transformation that epitomizes what historian Richard Hofstadter years ago called the “paranoid streak” in American politics. (Try a Google Internet search for “George Bush and Hitler:’ for example.) On the other hand, worries about conspiracy thinking should not inhibit inquiries in a way that blocks sober examination, which often more properly identifies some kind of elite behavior familiar to sociologists and political scientists alike.

The particular evolution of elites within nations that became leading world economic powers over the last four centuries is a subject I have discussed in several previous books, especially Wealth and Democracy (2002). The rise of a nation’s “establishment” to its zenith is invariably an accretive process, not a successfully executed sequence of plots. Still, “old-boy” net works or their equivalents usually play a significant role in maintaining a group in power.

Treating the Bush presidencies as growing out of a four-generation interaction with the so-called U.S. establishment is, in a word, essential. Like wise, dealing separately with the administrations of George H. W and George W—or worse, ignoring commonalities of behavior in office—is like considering individual planets while ignoring their place within the solar system.

Four examples are illustrative. One is the repeated use of family influence in arranging or smoothing over difficulties in the military service of three generations of Bushes: Prescott, George H. W, and George W. Similarly, the involvement of four Walker and Bush generations with finance—in several cases, the investment side of the petroleum business—helps to explain their recurrent preoccupation with investments, capital gains, and tax shelters. George W. Bush’s 2003 commitment to ending taxation of dividends was simply an extension of his father’s frequent calls for reducing capital gains tax rates as the solution to any weakness in the national economy. Third, the family’s ties to oil date back to Ohio steelmaker Samuel Bush’s relationship to Standard Oil a century ago, while its ultimately dynastic connection to Enron spanned the first national Bush administration, the six years of George W. Bush’s governorship of Texas, and the first year of his Washington incumbency. No other presidential family has made such prolonged efforts on behalf of a single corporation. Finally, there is no previous parallel to the relationships between the Bushes and the CIA and its predecessor organizations, which began in the invisible-ink and Ashenden, Secret Agent days of George Herbert Walker and Prescott Bush. Quite simply, analyzing separately the two Bush presidencies risks losing sight of such essential and revealing leitmotifs.

Arguably, a clan lacking such continuity of interests and relationships probably could not have succeeded in establishing a dynastic presidency. It would not have developed the requisite links to the establishment. It should be noted that the term “dynastic” is used here to describe a fact, not a theory: namely, the succession of 2000, in which the eldest son of a defeated president was eight years later chosen by his father’s party and inaugurated as the next president. Such inheritance has no American precedent; it trespasses, at least spiritually, on the governance framed by Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and Madison. Hereditary rulers were to be feared, the founders knew, even when, like the fifteenth-century Medicis of Florence, they initially chose to keep the framework of the Republic in place.

While the election of 2000 became an obvious pivot by marking a full-fledged family restoration, the election of 1994 must be considered a secondary milestone, for it served to anoint formally eldest son George W. Bush, already the most logical choice to follow in his father’s footsteps. Winning the Texas governorship that year established him as the family political heir over his younger brother, who lost a statehouse bid in Florida. Sharing his father’s name, looking eerily like him, and having a similar electoral base in Texas, George W. was able to embody a much more resonant promise of “restoration” among voters than could have been managed by his younger brother Jeb. Also to the point, the 1994 elections suggested the motivational potential for a restoration: namely, the moral anger of a large portion of the American electorate—pollster Gallup came to call them “the repulsed”—with the new president, Bill Clinton. Not a few voters felt apologetic, survey takers found, for having turned the elder Bush out of office in 1992.

Were history to posit a “Bush era,” lasting from George H. W. Bush’s triumph in 1988 through 2008, the two family presidencies might well define the entire two decades, turning the Clinton years pinto the political equivalent of sandwich filler. On the other hand, were Senator Hillary Clinton to achieve in 2008 a second restoration, this one Clintonian, public perception might well lurch toward some American equivalent of the fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses, during which the English Crown was contested by the houses of York and Lancaster.

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. Other seats in the U.S. Senate, in the meantime, began to pass more like membership in Britain’s House of Lords. Regionally, the prime example of family continuity in national government has been New England. In Rhode Island, Republican Lincoln Chafee took the Senate seat of his father, John Chafee, when the latter died in 1999. Next door, Edward Kennedy occupies the Massachusetts Senate seat vacated by his brother when he became president, and just to the west in Connecticut, Senator Christopher Dodd sits where his father sat from 1958 to 1970. Parenthetically, both senators from New Hampshire are the sons of former governors. One of those from Maine is the wife of a former governor.

Dynasticism, then, is clearly not just a peculiarity of the Bush presidency. Yet there was a vital catalyst in the 1996-98 jelling among Republicans of a commitment, backstopped by favorable national polls, to running the Bush family’s eldest heir for the presidency. It helped to legitimize a larger trend, broadening its momentum.

In this context, religion furnished another critical engine for a Bush triumph. To many Republicans and independents, the Bush family appeal was renewed in 1993-94 by ongoing revelations of Clinton’s moral turpitude and his eventual impeachment. Perhaps because of how this tide of moral outrage had come to arouse southern fundamentalist constituencies, George W. Bush began to emphasize and display unusual personal religiosity. He cast himself as the prodigal son, brought back to God after waywardness and crisis. From 1994 to 2000, he repeatedly used such biblically inflected language about good and evil that one could almost hear the words of Daniel and Jeremiah. So close did he draw to evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant leaders that in 2001, the Washington Post suggested that the new president had virtually replaced evangelist Pat Robertson as the leader of the U.S. Religious Right. To have suggested, any similar role being assumed by his father would have been laughable.

In contrast to the sophisticated 1990s dialogue saluting globalization, Internet democracy, and the supposed end of history, much of the world’s population, especially its poor and dispossessed, was participating in a quite dissimilar expression—a swell of fundamentalist and evangelical religion, often with a strong admixture of nationalism. While a few nations were actively seeking restorations and the resumption of power by kings, this larger trend, affecting Protestants, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists alike, dwelled instead on prophets and pharaohs, awaited or feared ones (red calves, Mahdis, and Antichrists), holy cities, and desecrating unbelievers, along with more ominous events like jihads, end times, raptures, and ultimate Armageddon.

Well might embattled Americans, weary of warfare in the Holy Land, yearn for the simple “family” issues propounded in the cultural politics of the 1980s and 1990s—most of which were used in a calculated courtship directed at low- and middle-income voters stressed by two-earner households, lengthened work hours, and day-care and tax pressures. Unfortunately, by the time these day-to-day issues were overshadowed by stock market crashes, terrorism, and war in the early 2000s, little net economic progress had been made. If anything, the stress on ordinary families was now even greater.

Thus the irony: The dominant “family-related” trend taking the United States into the twenty-first century turned out to be a form of classic reaction. In economics, it favored aristocracies of both capital and skills, from Wall Street to major-league baseball. Family values were brandished to save multimillionaires from the federal inheritance tax. In politics, “family” bred dynasties and elite entrenchment. Even more broadly, amid the fear of additional barbarian attacks in the 9/11 vein, Americans slid toward an other historical reversal: allowing the eighteenth-century republic to be re-conceptualized as an embattled twenty-first-century imperium, threatened by dangers and strains not unlike those that plagued third- and fourth-century Rome.

The central purpose of this book is to interweave several strands of analysis and thought that need to be considered together if we are truly to understand the perilous state of the American political system. One is the political and religious fundamentalism that has gained strength as the new century has unfolded. A second is the ever-changing importance within the United States of different economic sectors and elites—from investment banking and oil to the military-industrial complex. The third is the twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century emergence of the Bush family, which this volume seeks to track along a trajectory of American wealth and power through the heydays of Wall Street investment banking, Ivy League clubdom, and Texas petropolitics and into the post—World War II emergence of the CIA and rise of the national security state.

Until now, our political history has embodied a different, mid-century flavored saga centered on careers of men like Dean Acheson, Robert A. Lovett, and W. Averell Harriman, who played their starring national roles from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. Now a new dynasty warrants a dif -ferent national story. The Bushes and their initially more influential Walker family in-laws were also “present at the creation,” to use Acheson’s term, but in secondary capacities. The family stepped into public visibility only in 1952, when Prescott Bush, managing partner at Brown Brothers Harriman, for many years the nation’s biggest private investment bank, won election to the U.S. Senate from Connecticut. He also became a favorite golf partner of President Eisenhower, also impressing the then vice president, Richard Nixon.

When Nixon, in turn, won the presidency in 1968, he would treat George H. W. Bush, a first-term congressman, as befit the son of Prescott Bush. The younger Bush had also been commended to Nixon by former Republican presidential nominee Thomas E. Dewey, probably the one man most responsible for convincing Dwight Eisenhower to take Nixon as his running mate back in 1952. Thus did the Nixon administration become the all-important career elevator for the little-known U.S. representative from Houston.

Eastern patricians, even the oil-stained variety, were rare in the Nixon entourage—and for that matter, rare in national Republican elective politics. Nixon wore them as badges of social acceptance; he had taken one, former U.S. senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, as his vice presidential running mate in 1960. Eight years later, he let the name of George H. W. Bush make the vice presidential rumor mills, less because of any possible appeal Bush might have in Texas than for the socioeconomic reassurance he would offer to New York and Connecticut Republican donors and Ivy League clubland.

Appointments to the United Nations (1970) and the Republican National Committee (1973) brought Bush cabinet and Nixon-inner-circle status, maintaining the Washington visibility critical to his future. Nixon valued Bush’s family connections, gung ho spirit, personal likeability, and social outreach. Similar considerations helped to guide President Ford’s 1975 selection of him to head the CIA, a famous repository of Yale alumni. Bush wanted to be—and perhaps was—taken as qualified for the cabinet in the unelected, bred-to-it manner of a Curzon, Cecil, or Lansdowne in Edwardian England.

This, to be sure, is getting ahead of our story. What made it possible to consider Bush for vice president in 1968, almost out of the blue, was that some fifty years earlier, his two grandfathers—George Herbert Walker, a well-connected St. Louis financier, and Samuel Prescott Bush, a wealthy Ohio railroad equipment manufacturer—had managed to implant themselves and their descendants in the eastern establishment. This helped Prescott Bush get ahead, much as later connections helped George H. W. and George W.

To tell their tale, American Dynasty unfolds like this: Chapter 1 introduces the Bushes as our “not-quite-royal family.” I’m not being facetious here. The Bush royal connections documented in Burke’s Peerage and else where have nourished the self-image of both chief executives. However, the real founding father of the Bush clan was not a Bush, but a Walker—George H. Walker, for whom both the forty-first and forty-third presidents are named.

If Samuel P. Bush made money and connections in World War I, which he did, Walker made more of each. Afterward, he was wooed in 1919 by Averell Harriman to run an ambitious set of investments about to be cobbled together in the postwar political maelstrom of 1920s Germany and Russia. Over two decades, father-in-law Walker helped steer Prescott Bush to the top of what became the Brown Brothers Harriman of mid-century—rich, full of Yale Skull and Bonesmen, London-linked, politically influential, and intimately wired through several of its top partners to the postwar birthing of the CIA. During the first half of the twentieth century, the United States had evolved its own version of “permanent government” akin to the British model. Although this establishment peaked from the 1920s through the 1950s, its influence lingered, to George H. W. Bush’s critical advantage.

Chapter 1 concludes the family portrait with the two-decade-long ideological and religious transformation that proved so important to the presidential restoration in 2000. Consummated by George W. Bush, this change from Connecticut pinstripes and Episcopal church pews to Texas cowboy boots and fundamentalist religious alliances conveniently mirrored the late-twentieth-century migration of the U.S. population and of political power. It must be counted as one of the most successful makeovers in modern history

Chapter 2 examines the underlying cultural and economic forces that helped to make dynastization of wealth and politics a turn-of-the-twenty first-century reality. Pseudo-aristocratic taste caught hold in the United States of the 1980s through the ersatz British clothing and furnishings of Ralph Lauren and the success of magazines like Architectural Digest and Yachting, as well as the chic of the Bloomingdale’s—Metropolitan Museum— Diana Vreeland Chinese and French fashion party circuit patronized and promoted by President and Mrs. Reagan. Celebrity culture sought out stardom in everything from baseball and rock music to the corporate executive suite, while in economics, a kindred winner-take-all ethos widened the chasm between top and middle earners. The bull market in stocks between 1982 and 1999, in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average pole-vaulted by some 1,300 percent, gilded the fortunes of the top 1 percent of American families by tying the escalation of wealth to stock ownership. This convergence of economic and cultural favoritism furthered the rise of great-family politics in the United States.

Chapter 3 considers the Bush restoration in the election of 2000 from two separate perspectives: its genesis in U.S. domestic politics and its European historical analogies. The similarities between the United States at the end of the Clinton years and the England of 1660—61 and the France of 1814—15 suggest the parallel forces at work. The English in the 1640s and the French in the 1790s had executed their kings and expelled their ruling houses. Within two decades or so, the regicides in each nation had worn out their moral and political welcome, creating support for bringing back the old royal houses.

The American electorate’s overthrow of George Bush in 1992 brought in Bill Clinton. However, Clinton’s 1993-94 moral disrepute, peaking with his 1998-99 impeachment, enabled a Republican restorationist campaign, strongest in the evangelical and fundamentalist South, that rallied just enough voters to inaugurate the born-again George W. Bush. Economic conservatives, meanwhile, supported a Bush reinstatement for oil, defense, and Wall Street—based reasons. When Bush took office in 2001, a parallel to Stuart and Bourbon arrogance quickly emerged in the new regime’s insistence on ideological conservatism despite the lack of any such national mandate. Restoration drinks from its own special psychological well.

The first three chapters lay out part l’s framework of family, dynasty, and restoration. Part 2 turns to the origins, nature, and bias of Bush economic policies and relationships to governments. Chapter 4 begins with a portrait of Texanomics—its cultural harshness and fiscal regressivity. It also plumbs the irony of how the state has managed to reconcile the free market mythology with world-famous crony capitalism and preeminence in pressing for federal bailouts in the 1980s and 1990s.

The four-generation Bush and Walker involvement in the investment business antedates the family’s arrival in Texas, but since George H. W. Bush and his family moved to oil country, their business behavior has become increasingly aligned with the state’s stereotype, thriving on family connections, cronyism, paper entrepreneurialism, tax shelters, and government influence. On a national basis, however, the harsh reputation of Lone Star State economics—confirmed by official data on environmental quality, education, and income distribution—has obliged the family’s presidential office seekers to wear “kinder and gentler” policies and “compassionate conservatism” as velvet cloaking.

Chapter 5 moves from the duality of harshness-cum-compassion to the 2001-4 mind-set of a regime headed by two former Texas-based energy company chief executives, captaining the most energy-dominated national administration in U.S. history. A survey of the mutual assistance of the Bush family and Enron since 1985 is followed by a look at the crony capitalism unfurled during Cheney’s stewardship of the Halliburton Corporation. As we will see, Enron and Halliburton shared many interests and biases.

Chapter 6, the final economic profile in part 2, returns to the interrelationship of the Bush dynasty and the rising military-national security-industrial complex—from World War I through the tumult of the twentieth century to the complex’s early-twenty-first-century metamorphosis in the upthrust of terrorism and homeland-security issues. This is a chapter in which many forces come together. One subsection focuses on World War II and the enlargement and mutation of the early military-industrial complex, including the absorption of Germany-savvy U.S. business, financial, and legal elites into the OSS, the CIA, and kindred agencies in the 1940s. George H. Walker, Prescott Bush, Brown Brothers Harriman, and their Yale and Wall Street colleagues were all important actors in this drama.

Another section of chapter 6 looks at the first three generations of the Bush dynasty—from Samuel Bush, George Walker, and Prescott Bush through George H. W. Bush—and their involvements with the national security establishment. Too little attention has been paid to the strong connections developed between the Bush family and the CIA many years before George H. W. Bush ran it. Under George W. Bush, the CIA has flexed more muscle than ever.

Part 3 turns to another theme: the politics, geopolitics, and wars that have arisen, at least in part, out of the restoration psychology and fundamentalist theology of George W. Bush. The implications here are still taking shape.

Part of what restored the Bushes to the White House in 2000 through a southern-dominated electoral coalition was the emergence of George W. Bush during the 1990s as a born-again favorite of conservative Christian evangelical and fundamentalist voters. His 2001-4 policies and rhetoric confirmed that bond. The idea that the de facto head of the Religious Right and the president of the United States can be the same person is a precedent-shattering circumstance that has barely crept into national political discussion. Chapter 7 looks at the thirty-year rise of the Religious Right in U.S. politics and how the Bush family has adjusted its religious intensity and shifted denominational identifications to ride that trend.

Recall, however, that the United States has by no means been alone in undergoing a recent surge in religious fundamentalism and nationalism. Chapter 7 documents related trends in many other nations and cultures: Islam from North Africa through the Middle East to Indonesia and the Philippines, nationalistic Buddhism in Japan, right-wing Hinduism in India, militant Judaism in Israel, and the icons-and-incense Orthodox Christianity of Eastern Europe and Russia. The apparent intensity of religious fundamentalism in the United States—polls reported that almost half of U.S. Christians believe in Armageddon, and the states of Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado succeeded in getting Washington to renumber U.S. Highway 666 because fundamentalist Christians worried about its satanic symbolism—demonstrates that not all of the world’s religious radicalism has loci in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Chapter 8, in turn, takes some of the religious and political links profiled in chapter 7 and examines their role, along with oil, armaments, and domestic political considerations, in the emergence of a new U.S. foreign policy, one that blends biblical bluntness about an “Axis of Evil” with skepticism, if not hostility, to the United Nations and an embrace of preemptive warfare. The fact is that any emergence of a U.S. “crusader state” stands to profit important economic interests even as it pleases religious fundamentalists.

Chapter 9, “The Wars of the Texas Succession,” examines the first and second wars with Iraq from a Bush dynastic standpoint. Texas presidents have now launched the last three U.S. wars: Vietnam, the Gulf War of 1991, and the 2003 war to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The latter two reflect a unique set of circumstances. They were the first pair of U.S. wars to be fought by father-and-son presidents, and were caused in part by a misconceived U.S. arms buildup in Iraq undertaken by Bush as Reagan’s vice president and then as president himself. They also reflected a two-generation Texan preoccupation with U.S. Middle Eastern and Caspian oil interests. “The War of the Texas Succession” thus has a geopolitical as well as a family-based foundation.

Finally, the afterword offers a short conclusion, which recalls the ways in which the founding fathers thought the American Republic might go astray. That the object of their labors might follow the pathway of the Florentine, Dutch, and other republics toward great-family and dynastic leadership was a real concern to them.

Just how dynastic the U.S. future will be, and with what consequences, remains to be seen. The tendencies may be nipped in the bud; the first decade of the twenty-first century may turn out to be an anomaly. What can be said today is that the circumstances of the United States in these tumultuous years have taken a turn that would have surprised and presumably appalled the nation’s founding fathers. As was the development of the so-called imperial presidency in the 1960s, the emergence of a dynastic presidency is contrary to the American political tradition, and the shorter its duration the better.

Introduction

Concern about a U.S. dynastic presidency first emerged in 2000, prompted by skeptics of the Bush succession, as well as by amateur historians unnerved by analogies to the seventeenth-century English Stuart and nineteenth-century French Bourbon restorations. The topic gained force and more widespread credibility when the 2002 elections confirmed George W. Bush’s popularity and when the war of early spring 2003 displayed his personal commitment to resuming his father’s unfinished combat with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Controversial wars and geopolitical ambitions, after all, have frequently originated as dynastic ambitions.

Other institutional aspects of a family-based presidency warrant national attention. Dynasties tend to show continuities of policy and interest-group bias—in the case of the Bushes, favoritism toward the energy sector, defense industries, the Pentagon, and the CIA, as well as insistence on tax breaks for the investor class and upper-income groups. By inauguration day of 2001, Houston-based Enron had a relationship with the Bush clan going back a decade and a half. Families restored to power also have a history of seeking revenge against old foes as well as recalling longtime loyalists and retainers. George W. Bush’s record has included retiring such taunters of his father as Texas governor Ann Richards (in 1994) and House Speaker Newt Gingrich (Bush helped to force him out after the 1998 elections) and appointing former officials dating back not just to his father’s term but to the Ford administration of 1974—76, a virtual incubator of the Republican Party’s Bush faction.

This dynasticism was hardly a phenomenon unique to the United States. In the first few years of the twenty-first century, the restoration of old European royal houses was discussed in Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Italy. As in the United States, the principals were political conservatives.

Another questionable aspect of dynastic control is the effect of biological inheritance. History is all too familiar with hereditary traits like the Hapsburg chin and the Tudor temper. Some pundits have queried whether heredity might likewise explain certain behaviors shared by the two Bush presidents—frenetic activity, scrambled speech, the hint of dyslexic arrangements of thought. Although the press has been reticent to pursue such matters, they do have a genuine relevance. Three, perhaps four, generations of Bushes have displayed great capacities for remembering names, faces, and statistics. Dallas News reporter Bill Minutaglio, a biographer of the younger Bush, discovered that George H. W. Bush “went so far as to tell his spokesman Marlin Fitzwater to gather together the photographs of the Washington press corps so he could memorize all their names; the Bush men were always startlingly better than anyone else at memorizing names” At the same time, both father and son have shown little talent for conceptualization or abstraction. Is it a coincidence? Dynasty with its subordination of individual achievement to gene pools and bloodlines, always involves a gamble on the nuances of heredity.

In the United States, as we will see, the twentieth-century rise of the Bush family was built on the five pillars of American global sway: the international reach of U.S. investment banking, the emerging giantism of the military-industrial complex, the ballooning of the CIA and kindred intelligence operations, the drive for U.S. control of global oil supplies, and a close alliance with Britain and the English-speaking community. This century of upward momentum brought a sequence of controversies, albeit ones that never gained critical mass—such as the exposure in 1942 of Prescott Bush’s corporate directorship links to wartime Germany, which harked back to overambitious 1920s investment banking; the Bush family’s longtime involvement with global armaments and the military-industrial complex; and a web of close connections to the CIA, which began decades before George Bush’s brief CIA directorship in 1976. Threads like these may not weigh heavily on individual presidencies; they are many times more troubling when they run through several generations of a dynasty.

We must be cautious here not to transmute commercial relationships into a latter-day conspiracy theory a transformation that epitomizes what historian Richard Hofstadter years ago called the “paranoid streak” in American politics. (Try a Google Internet search for “George Bush and Hitler:’ for example.) On the other hand, worries about conspiracy thinking should not inhibit inquiries in a way that blocks sober examination, which often more properly identifies some kind of elite behavior familiar to sociologists and political scientists alike.

The particular evolution of elites within nations that became leading world economic powers over the last four centuries is a subject I have discussed in several previous books, especially Wealth and Democracy (2002). The rise of a nation’s “establishment” to its zenith is invariably an accretive process, not a successfully executed sequence of plots. Still, “old-boy” net works or their equivalents usually play a significant role in maintaining a group in power.

Treating the Bush presidencies as growing out of a four-generation interaction with the so-called U.S. establishment is, in a word, essential. Like wise, dealing separately with the administrations of George H. W and George W—or worse, ignoring commonalities of behavior in office—is like considering individual planets while ignoring their place within the solar system.

Four examples are illustrative. One is the repeated use of family influence in arranging or smoothing over difficulties in the military service of three generations of Bushes: Prescott, George H. W, and George W. Similarly, the involvement of four Walker and Bush generations with finance—in several cases, the investment side of the petroleum business—helps to explain their recurrent preoccupation with investments, capital gains, and tax shelters. George W. Bush’s 2003 commitment to ending taxation of dividends was simply an extension of his father’s frequent calls for reducing capital gains tax rates as the solution to any weakness in the national economy. Third, the family’s ties to oil date back to Ohio steelmaker Samuel Bush’s relationship to Standard Oil a century ago, while its ultimately dynastic connection to Enron spanned the first national Bush administration, the six years of George W. Bush’s governorship of Texas, and the first year of his Washington incumbency. No other presidential family has made such prolonged efforts on behalf of a single corporation. Finally, there is no previous parallel to the relationships between the Bushes and the CIA and its predecessor organizations, which began in the invisible-ink and Ashenden, Secret Agent days of George Herbert Walker and Prescott Bush. Quite simply, analyzing separately the two Bush presidencies risks losing sight of such essential and revealing leitmotifs.

Arguably, a clan lacking such continuity of interests and relationships probably could not have succeeded in establishing a dynastic presidency. It would not have developed the requisite links to the establishment. It should be noted that the term “dynastic” is used here to describe a fact, not a theory: namely, the succession of 2000, in which the eldest son of a defeated president was eight years later chosen by his father’s party and inaugurated as the next president. Such inheritance has no American precedent; it trespasses, at least spiritually, on the governance framed by Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and Madison. Hereditary rulers were to be feared, the founders knew, even when, like the fifteenth-century Medicis of Florence, they initially chose to keep the framework of the Republic in place.

While the election of 2000 became an obvious pivot by marking a full-fledged family restoration, the election of 1994 must be considered a secondary milestone, for it served to anoint formally eldest son George W. Bush, already the most logical choice to follow in his father’s footsteps. Winning the Texas governorship that year established him as the family political heir over his younger brother, who lost a statehouse bid in Florida. Sharing his father’s name, looking eerily like him, and having a similar electoral base in Texas, George W. was able to embody a much more resonant promise of “restoration” among voters than could have been managed by his younger brother Jeb. Also to the point, the 1994 elections suggested the motivational potential for a restoration: namely, the moral anger of a large portion of the American electorate—pollster Gallup came to call them “the repulsed”—with the new president, Bill Clinton. Not a few voters felt apologetic, survey takers found, for having turned the elder Bush out of office in 1992.

Were history to posit a “Bush era,” lasting from George H. W. Bush’s triumph in 1988 through 2008, the two family presidencies might well define the entire two decades, turning the Clinton years pinto the political equivalent of sandwich filler. On the other hand, were Senator Hillary Clinton to achieve in 2008 a second restoration, this one Clintonian, public perception might well lurch toward some American equivalent of the fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses, during which the English Crown was contested by the houses of York and Lancaster.

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. Other seats in the U.S. Senate, in the meantime, began to pass more like membership in Britain’s House of Lords. Regionally, the prime example of family continuity in national government has been New England. In Rhode Island, Republican Lincoln Chafee took the Senate seat of his father, John Chafee, when the latter died in 1999. Next door, Edward Kennedy occupies the Massachusetts Senate seat vacated by his brother when he became president, and just to the west in Connecticut, Senator Christopher Dodd sits where his father sat from 1958 to 1970. Parenthetically, both senators from New Hampshire are the sons of former governors. One of those from Maine is the wife of a former governor.

Dynasticism, then, is clearly not just a peculiarity of the Bush presidency. Yet there was a vital catalyst in the 1996-98 jelling among Republicans of a commitment, backstopped by favorable national polls, to running the Bush family’s eldest heir for the presidency. It helped to legitimize a larger trend, broadening its momentum.

In this context, religion furnished another critical engine for a Bush triumph. To many Republicans and independents, the Bush family appeal was renewed in 1993-94 by ongoing revelations of Clinton’s moral turpitude and his eventual impeachment. Perhaps because of how this tide of moral outrage had come to arouse southern fundamentalist constituencies, George W. Bush began to emphasize and display unusual personal religiosity. He cast himself as the prodigal son, brought back to God after waywardness and crisis. From 1994 to 2000, he repeatedly used such biblically inflected language about good and evil that one could almost hear the words of Daniel and Jeremiah. So close did he draw to evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant leaders that in 2001, the Washington Post suggested that the new president had virtually replaced evangelist Pat Robertson as the leader of the U.S. Religious Right. To have suggested, any similar role being assumed by his father would have been laughable.

In contrast to the sophisticated 1990s dialogue saluting globalization, Internet democracy, and the supposed end of history, much of the world’s population, especially its poor and dispossessed, was participating in a quite dissimilar expression—a swell of fundamentalist and evangelical religion, often with a strong admixture of nationalism. While a few nations were actively seeking restorations and the resumption of power by kings, this larger trend, affecting Protestants, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists alike, dwelled instead on prophets and pharaohs, awaited or feared ones (red calves, Mahdis, and Antichrists), holy cities, and desecrating unbelievers, along with more ominous events like jihads, end times, raptures, and ultimate Armageddon.

Well might embattled Americans, weary of warfare in the Holy Land, yearn for the simple “family” issues propounded in the cultural politics of the 1980s and 1990s—most of which were used in a calculated courtship directed at low- and middle-income voters stressed by two-earner households, lengthened work hours, and day-care and tax pressures. Unfortunately, by the time these day-to-day issues were overshadowed by stock market crashes, terrorism, and war in the early 2000s, little net economic progress had been made. If anything, the stress on ordinary families was now even greater.

Thus the irony: The dominant “family-related” trend taking the United States into the twenty-first century turned out to be a form of classic reaction. In economics, it favored aristocracies of both capital and skills, from Wall Street to major-league baseball. Family values were brandished to save multimillionaires from the federal inheritance tax. In politics, “family” bred dynasties and elite entrenchment. Even more broadly, amid the fear of additional barbarian attacks in the 9/11 vein, Americans slid toward an other historical reversal: allowing the eighteenth-century republic to be re-conceptualized as an embattled twenty-first-century imperium, threatened by dangers and strains not unlike those that plagued third- and fourth-century Rome.

The central purpose of this book is to interweave several strands of analysis and thought that need to be considered together if we are truly to understand the perilous state of the American political system. One is the political and religious fundamentalism that has gained strength as the new century has unfolded. A second is the ever-changing importance within the United States of different economic sectors and elites—from investment banking and oil to the military-industrial complex. The third is the twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century emergence of the Bush family, which this volume seeks to track along a trajectory of American wealth and power through the heydays of Wall Street investment banking, Ivy League clubdom, and Texas petropolitics and into the post—World War II emergence of the CIA and rise of the national security state.

Until now, our political history has embodied a different, mid-century flavored saga centered on careers of men like Dean Acheson, Robert A. Lovett, and W. Averell Harriman, who played their starring national roles from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. Now a new dynasty warrants a dif -ferent national story. The Bushes and their initially more influential Walker family in-laws were also “present at the creation,” to use Acheson’s term, but in secondary capacities. The family stepped into public visibility only in 1952, when Prescott Bush, managing partner at Brown Brothers Harriman, for many years the nation’s biggest private investment bank, won election to the U.S. Senate from Connecticut. He also became a favorite golf partner of President Eisenhower, also impressing the then vice president, Richard Nixon.

When Nixon, in turn, won the presidency in 1968, he would treat George H. W. Bush, a first-term congressman, as befit the son of Prescott Bush. The younger Bush had also been commended to Nixon by former Republican presidential nominee Thomas E. Dewey, probably the one man most responsible for convincing Dwight Eisenhower to take Nixon as his running mate back in 1952. Thus did the Nixon administration become the all-important career elevator for the little-known U.S. representative from Houston.

Eastern patricians, even the oil-stained variety, were rare in the Nixon entourage—and for that matter, rare in national Republican elective politics. Nixon wore them as badges of social acceptance; he had taken one, former U.S. senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, as his vice presidential running mate in 1960. Eight years later, he let the name of George H. W. Bush make the vice presidential rumor mills, less because of any possible appeal Bush might have in Texas than for the socioeconomic reassurance he would offer to New York and Connecticut Republican donors and Ivy League clubland.

Appointments to the United Nations (1970) and the Republican National Committee (1973) brought Bush cabinet and Nixon-inner-circle status, maintaining the Washington visibility critical to his future. Nixon valued Bush’s family connections, gung ho spirit, personal likeability, and social outreach. Similar considerations helped to guide President Ford’s 1975 selection of him to head the CIA, a famous repository of Yale alumni. Bush wanted to be—and perhaps was—taken as qualified for the cabinet in the unelected, bred-to-it manner of a Curzon, Cecil, or Lansdowne in Edwardian England.

This, to be sure, is getting ahead of our story. What made it possible to consider Bush for vice president in 1968, almost out of the blue, was that some fifty years earlier, his two grandfathers—George Herbert Walker, a well-connected St. Louis financier, and Samuel Prescott Bush, a wealthy Ohio railroad equipment manufacturer—had managed to implant themselves and their descendants in the eastern establishment. This helped Prescott Bush get ahead, much as later connections helped George H. W. and George W.

To tell their tale, American Dynasty unfolds like this: Chapter 1 introduces the Bushes as our “not-quite-royal family.” I’m not being facetious here. The Bush royal connections documented in Burke’s Peerage and else where have nourished the self-image of both chief executives. However, the real founding father of the Bush clan was not a Bush, but a Walker—George H. Walker, for whom both the forty-first and forty-third presidents are named.

If Samuel P. Bush made money and connections in World War I, which he did, Walker made more of each. Afterward, he was wooed in 1919 by Averell Harriman to run an ambitious set of investments about to be cobbled together in the postwar political maelstrom of 1920s Germany and Russia. Over two decades, father-in-law Walker helped steer Prescott Bush to the top of what became the Brown Brothers Harriman of mid-century—rich, full of Yale Skull and Bonesmen, London-linked, politically influential, and intimately wired through several of its top partners to the postwar birthing of the CIA. During the first half of the twentieth century, the United States had evolved its own version of “permanent government” akin to the British model. Although this establishment peaked from the 1920s through the 1950s, its influence lingered, to George H. W. Bush’s critical advantage.

Chapter 1 concludes the family portrait with the two-decade-long ideological and religious transformation that proved so important to the presidential restoration in 2000. Consummated by George W. Bush, this change from Connecticut pinstripes and Episcopal church pews to Texas cowboy boots and fundamentalist religious alliances conveniently mirrored the late-twentieth-century migration of the U.S. population and of political power. It must be counted as one of the most successful makeovers in modern history

Chapter 2 examines the underlying cultural and economic forces that helped to make dynastization of wealth and politics a turn-of-the-twenty first-century reality. Pseudo-aristocratic taste caught hold in the United States of the 1980s through the ersatz British clothing and furnishings of Ralph Lauren and the success of magazines like Architectural Digest and Yachting, as well as the chic of the Bloomingdale’s—Metropolitan Museum— Diana Vreeland Chinese and French fashion party circuit patronized and promoted by President and Mrs. Reagan. Celebrity culture sought out stardom in everything from baseball and rock music to the corporate executive suite, while in economics, a kindred winner-take-all ethos widened the chasm between top and middle earners. The bull market in stocks between 1982 and 1999, in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average pole-vaulted by some 1,300 percent, gilded the fortunes of the top 1 percent of American families by tying the escalation of wealth to stock ownership. This convergence of economic and cultural favoritism furthered the rise of great-family politics in the United States.

Chapter 3 considers the Bush restoration in the election of 2000 from two separate perspectives: its genesis in U.S. domestic politics and its European historical analogies. The similarities between the United States at the end of the Clinton years and the England of 1660—61 and the France of 1814—15 suggest the parallel forces at work. The English in the 1640s and the French in the 1790s had executed their kings and expelled their ruling houses. Within two decades or so, the regicides in each nation had worn out their moral and political welcome, creating support for bringing back the old royal houses.

The American electorate’s overthrow of George Bush in 1992 brought in Bill Clinton. However, Clinton’s 1993-94 moral disrepute, peaking with his 1998-99 impeachment, enabled a Republican restorationist campaign, strongest in the evangelical and fundamentalist South, that rallied just enough voters to inaugurate the born-again George W. Bush. Economic conservatives, meanwhile, supported a Bush reinstatement for oil, defense, and Wall Street—based reasons. When Bush took office in 2001, a parallel to Stuart and Bourbon arrogance quickly emerged in the new regime’s insistence on ideological conservatism despite the lack of any such national mandate. Restoration drinks from its own special psychological well.

The first three chapters lay out part l’s framework of family, dynasty, and restoration. Part 2 turns to the origins, nature, and bias of Bush economic policies and relationships to governments. Chapter 4 begins with a portrait of Texanomics—its cultural harshness and fiscal regressivity. It also plumbs the irony of how the state has managed to reconcile the free market mythology with world-famous crony capitalism and preeminence in pressing for federal bailouts in the 1980s and 1990s.

The four-generation Bush and Walker involvement in the investment business antedates the family’s arrival in Texas, but since George H. W. Bush and his family moved to oil country, their business behavior has become increasingly aligned with the state’s stereotype, thriving on family connections, cronyism, paper entrepreneurialism, tax shelters, and government influence. On a national basis, however, the harsh reputation of Lone Star State economics—confirmed by official data on environmental quality, education, and income distribution—has obliged the family’s presidential office seekers to wear “kinder and gentler” policies and “compassionate conservatism” as velvet cloaking.

Chapter 5 moves from the duality of harshness-cum-compassion to the 2001-4 mind-set of a regime headed by two former Texas-based energy company chief executives, captaining the most energy-dominated national administration in U.S. history. A survey of the mutual assistance of the Bush family and Enron since 1985 is followed by a look at the crony capitalism unfurled during Cheney’s stewardship of the Halliburton Corporation. As we will see, Enron and Halliburton shared many interests and biases.

Chapter 6, the final economic profile in part 2, returns to the interrelationship of the Bush dynasty and the rising military-national security-industrial complex—from World War I through the tumult of the twentieth century to the complex’s early-twenty-first-century metamorphosis in the upthrust of terrorism and homeland-security issues. This is a chapter in which many forces come together. One subsection focuses on World War II and the enlargement and mutation of the early military-industrial complex, including the absorption of Germany-savvy U.S. business, financial, and legal elites into the OSS, the CIA, and kindred agencies in the 1940s. George H. Walker, Prescott Bush, Brown Brothers Harriman, and their Yale and Wall Street colleagues were all important actors in this drama.

Another section of chapter 6 looks at the first three generations of the Bush dynasty—from Samuel Bush, George Walker, and Prescott Bush through George H. W. Bush—and their involvements with the national security establishment. Too little attention has been paid to the strong connections developed between the Bush family and the CIA many years before George H. W. Bush ran it. Under George W. Bush, the CIA has flexed more muscle than ever.

Part 3 turns to another theme: the politics, geopolitics, and wars that have arisen, at least in part, out of the restoration psychology and fundamentalist theology of George W. Bush. The implications here are still taking shape.

Part of what restored the Bushes to the White House in 2000 through a southern-dominated electoral coalition was the emergence of George W. Bush during the 1990s as a born-again favorite of conservative Christian evangelical and fundamentalist voters. His 2001-4 policies and rhetoric confirmed that bond. The idea that the de facto head of the Religious Right and the president of the United States can be the same person is a precedent-shattering circumstance that has barely crept into national political discussion. Chapter 7 looks at the thirty-year rise of the Religious Right in U.S. politics and how the Bush family has adjusted its religious intensity and shifted denominational identifications to ride that trend.

Recall, however, that the United States has by no means been alone in undergoing a recent surge in religious fundamentalism and nationalism. Chapter 7 documents related trends in many other nations and cultures: Islam from North Africa through the Middle East to Indonesia and the Philippines, nationalistic Buddhism in Japan, right-wing Hinduism in India, militant Judaism in Israel, and the icons-and-incense Orthodox Christianity of Eastern Europe and Russia. The apparent intensity of religious fundamentalism in the United States—polls reported that almost half of U.S. Christians believe in Armageddon, and the states of Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado succeeded in getting Washington to renumber U.S. Highway 666 because fundamentalist Christians worried about its satanic symbolism—demonstrates that not all of the world’s religious radicalism has loci in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Chapter 8, in turn, takes some of the religious and political links profiled in chapter 7 and examines their role, along with oil, armaments, and domestic political considerations, in the emergence of a new U.S. foreign policy, one that blends biblical bluntness about an “Axis of Evil” with skepticism, if not hostility, to the United Nations and an embrace of preemptive warfare. The fact is that any emergence of a U.S. “crusader state” stands to profit important economic interests even as it pleases religious fundamentalists.

Chapter 9, “The Wars of the Texas Succession,” examines the first and second wars with Iraq from a Bush dynastic standpoint. Texas presidents have now launched the last three U.S. wars: Vietnam, the Gulf War of 1991, and the 2003 war to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The latter two reflect a unique set of circumstances. They were the first pair of U.S. wars to be fought by father-and-son presidents, and were caused in part by a misconceived U.S. arms buildup in Iraq undertaken by Bush as Reagan’s vice president and then as president himself. They also reflected a two-generation Texan preoccupation with U.S. Middle Eastern and Caspian oil interests. “The War of the Texas Succession” thus has a geopolitical as well as a family-based foundation.

Finally, the afterword offers a short conclusion, which recalls the ways in which the founding fathers thought the American Republic might go astray. That the object of their labors might follow the pathway of the Florentine, Dutch, and other republics toward great-family and dynastic leadership was a real concern to them.

Just how dynastic the U.S. future will be, and with what consequences, remains to be seen. The tendencies may be nipped in the bud; the first decade of the twenty-first century may turn out to be an anomaly. What can be said today is that the circumstances of the United States in these tumultuous years have taken a turn that would have surprised and presumably appalled the nation’s founding fathers. As was the development of the so-called imperial presidency in the 1960s, the emergence of a dynastic presidency is contrary to the American political tradition, and the shorter its duration the better.

The Bushes are the family nobody really knows, says Kevin Phillips. This popular lack of acquaintance—nurtured by gauzy imagery of Maine summer cottages, gray-haired national grandmothers, July Fourth sparklers, and cowboy boots—has let national politics create a dynasticized presidency that would have horrified America’s founding fathers. They, after all, had led a revolution against a succession of royal Georges.

In this devastating book, onetime Republican strategist Phillips reveals how four generations of Bushes have ascended the ladder of national power since World War One, becoming entrenched within the American establishment—Yale, Wall Street, the Senate, the CIA, the vice presidency, and the presidency—through a recurrent flair for old-boy networking, national security involvement, and political deception. By uncovering relationships and connecting facts with new clarity, Phillips comes to a stunning conclusion: The Bush family has systematically used its financial and social empire—its “aristocracy”—to gain the White House, thereby subverting the very core of American democracy. In their ambition, the Bushes ultimately reinvented themselves with brilliant timing, twisting and turning from silver spoon Yankees to born-again evangelical Texans. As America—and the world—holds its breath for the 2004 presidential election, American Dynasty explains how it happened and what it all means.

Introduction

Concern about a U.S. dynastic presidency first emerged in 2000, prompted by skeptics of the Bush succession, as well as by amateur historians unnerved by analogies to the seventeenth-century English Stuart and nineteenth-century French Bourbon restorations. The topic gained force and more widespread credibility when the 2002 elections confirmed George W. Bush’s popularity and when the war of early spring 2003 displayed his personal commitment to resuming his father’s unfinished combat with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Controversial wars and geopolitical ambitions, after all, have frequently originated as dynastic ambitions.

Other institutional aspects of a family-based presidency warrant national attention. Dynasties tend to show continuities of policy and interest-group bias—in the case of the Bushes, favoritism toward the energy sector, defense industries, the Pentagon, and the CIA, as well as insistence on tax breaks for the investor class and upper-income groups. By inauguration day of 2001, Houston-based Enron had a relationship with the Bush clan going back a decade and a half. Families restored to power also have a history of seeking revenge against old foes as well as recalling longtime loyalists and retainers. George W. Bush’s record has included retiring such taunters of his father as Texas governor Ann Richards (in 1994) and House Speaker Newt Gingrich (Bush helped to force him out after the 1998 elections) and appointing former officials dating back not just to his father’s term but to the Ford administration of 1974—76, a virtual incubator of the Republican Party’s Bush faction.

This dynasticism was hardly a phenomenon unique to the United States. In the first few years of the twenty-first century, the restoration of old European royal houses was discussed in Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Italy. As in the United States, the principals were political conservatives.

Another questionable aspect of dynastic control is the effect of biological inheritance. History is all too familiar with hereditary traits like the Hapsburg chin and the Tudor temper. Some pundits have queried whether heredity might likewise explain certain behaviors shared by the two Bush presidents—frenetic activity, scrambled speech, the hint of dyslexic arrangements of thought. Although the press has been reticent to pursue such matters, they do have a genuine relevance. Three, perhaps four, generations of Bushes have displayed great capacities for remembering names, faces, and statistics. Dallas News reporter Bill Minutaglio, a biographer of the younger Bush, discovered that George H. W. Bush “went so far as to tell his spokesman Marlin Fitzwater to gather together the photographs of the Washington press corps so he could memorize all their names; the Bush men were always startlingly better than anyone else at memorizing names” At the same time, both father and son have shown little talent for conceptualization or abstraction. Is it a coincidence? Dynasty with its subordination of individual achievement to gene pools and bloodlines, always involves a gamble on the nuances of heredity.

In the United States, as we will see, the twentieth-century rise of the Bush family was built on the five pillars of American global sway: the international reach of U.S. investment banking, the emerging giantism of the military-industrial complex, the ballooning of the CIA and kindred intelligence operations, the drive for U.S. control of global oil supplies, and a close alliance with Britain and the English-speaking community. This century of upward momentum brought a sequence of controversies, albeit ones that never gained critical mass—such as the exposure in 1942 of Prescott Bush’s corporate directorship links to wartime Germany, which harked back to overambitious 1920s investment banking; the Bush family’s longtime involvement with global armaments and the military-industrial complex; and a web of close connections to the CIA, which began decades before George Bush’s brief CIA directorship in 1976. Threads like these may not weigh heavily on individual presidencies; they are many times more troubling when they run through several generations of a dynasty.

We must be cautious here not to transmute commercial relationships into a latter-day conspiracy theory a transformation that epitomizes what historian Richard Hofstadter years ago called the “paranoid streak” in American politics. (Try a Google Internet search for “George Bush and Hitler:’ for example.) On the other hand, worries about conspiracy thinking should not inhibit inquiries in a way that blocks sober examination, which often more properly identifies some kind of elite behavior familiar to sociologists and political scientists alike.

The particular evolution of elites within nations that became leading world economic powers over the last four centuries is a subject I have discussed in several previous books, especially Wealth and Democracy (2002). The rise of a nation’s “establishment” to its zenith is invariably an accretive process, not a successfully executed sequence of plots. Still, “old-boy” net works or their equivalents usually play a significant role in maintaining a group in power.

Treating the Bush presidencies as growing out of a four-generation interaction with the so-called U.S. establishment is, in a word, essential. Like wise, dealing separately with the administrations of George H. W and George W—or worse, ignoring commonalities of behavior in office—is like considering individual planets while ignoring their place within the solar system.

Four examples are illustrative. One is the repeated use of family influenc view abbreviated excerpt only...

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