The Bush Dynasty

To Phillips in “American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush,” this is Bush to the life, a cipher who succeeded a deposed, hated father, ousted by a regicide both kings had despised. Or perhaps Bush is really Louis XVIII, the Bourbon restored to the French throne after the battle of Waterloo, when it was clear that Napoleon hadn’t worked out. “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 . . . parallel forces,” Phillips informs us. “The English . . . and the French . . . had executed their kings and expelled their ruling houses. Within two decades or so the regicides . . . had worn out their moral and political welcome, creating support for bringing back the old royal houses.”

There are other parallels, a little more recent, although a little more obscure. “The restoration of George W. Bush in the United States had company. In Bulgaria, Simeon II . . . deposed as a boy in 1946, returned in 2001 as prime minister . . . in 2002, the Italian Parliament had laid the groundwork for restoring a sixty-three-year-old claimant to reign as Victor Emmanuel IV. In Serbia, the deceased father of Crown Prince Alexander lost his throne in 1945 . . . in 2001 . . . Alexander got his palace back, if not his throne. . . . This is more than eerie. A disturbing sidebar to the political culture of these restorations was how many of these would-be monarchs, royal houses, and supporting factions had been on the fascist side of World War II.”

Fascists! Of course! How could we omit them? “Eerie” doesn’t begin to describe it, as Phillips spins his tale of the past several decades in the dread House of Bush. Backed by a sordid cabal of oilmen, arms merchants, and CIA agents, George I climbed the greasy pole of preferment, where he was such a “spectacular failure” that he was symbolically beheaded by American voters in the election of 1992. In spite of this, his disgruntled supporters demonized his regicidal successor and plotted the return of the deposed fallen leader in the form of his clueless and figurehead son.

Phillips is impressed by Bush I’s startling drop from 53.4 percent of the vote in 1988 to 37.4 percent four years later, which he calls a political “earthquake.” But much of this was due to the third-party presence of H. Ross Perot, whose maverick campaign enabled Clinton to win a sizable victory in the electoral college with a mere 43 percent of the vote. Bill Clinton was neither a strongman nor regicide, but the legitimately elected choice of his party. George Bush the elder was neither despised nor detested; he was respected by his country for his work in the Gulf War and Cold War, and voted out by people who had never stopped liking him, although they now felt he had run out of steam. George Bush the younger was selected to run by his party less as his father’s son than as a break with tradition, as a “new kind of Republican” (as Clinton had run as a “new kind of Democrat”), backed at first less by the conservative base of his party than by the more diverse and eclectic Republican governors, eager to put their stamp on the national party and counter the image, promoted by Congress, of a party of angry white males. When he ran in 2000, George W. Bush patterned his campaign not on any one run by his father, but on Clinton’s campaign against his own father, when he ran as an innovative young southern governor, who took on a creature of Washington. (It was Al Gore who was often compared to George Bush the elder, as a two-term vice president, with impressive credentials, but lacking political instincts or skills.)

Beginning in 1968 as a student of Nixon, Phillips has long since moved into the Gore Vidal fever swamps, and his theme in “American Dynasty” often seems merely a contrivance with which to beat upon Bush. To a great extent, he rewrites Michael Lind’s book, “Made In Texas,” which claims, along with other strange observations, that the Connecticut-born Bushes are really in sync with Confederate theories, that the combined 2000 vote for Al Gore and Ralph Nader is a liberal landslide on the scale of Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 victory, that George W. Bush stole the 2000 election, that Texas is a toxic and foreign political culture, and that the modern Republican party is a malign gathering of bloodsuckers, bigots, and religious fanatics.

WITHOUT QUITE SAYING SO OPENLY, Phillips lays out a series of cases in which the elder George Bush or people close to him fiendishly worked to undermine President Carter and secure the election of Reagan that gave Bush his big chance. One is the theory that Richard Secord and other Bush connections in the Carter National Security Council purposely sabotaged the failed hostage rescue mission in April 1980. The second is the grassy-knoll theory of the October Surprise–that Republican bigwigs, George Bush among them, bribed Iran to keep the hostages until the election was over. (Phillips thinks Bush did not, as charged, make a secret visit to Paris. He just supervised things from back home.)

Phillips thinks that George Bush the elder was a failure in the first Gulf War, because Saddam survived and lived on to mock him; and he thinks that George Bush the younger is a failure in the second Gulf War, because Saddam was ousted and his ouster has led to a quagmire from which we will never emerge. Nowhere in “American Dynasty” is there a look at geopolitics or the costs of letting Saddam keep Kuwait.

Phillips also appears somewhat less than persuasive in his ideas of how dynasties work. “Dynasties in American politics are dangerous,” he wrote in the Los Angeles Times. But it is rather unlikely that many of the 48.9 million Americans who selected George W. Bush in the 2000 election were casting their votes for a Bush Restoration. They were voting instead for the young Texas governor, the new kind of Republican, the flag-bearer of the Republican governors, who were in the 1990s the most popular figures in politics. His father was liked, but did not rouse strong emotions, and his political profile was not well defined.

Besides, even American political figures who do arouse strong emotions find it difficult to bequeath their support to their heirs. Theodore Roosevelt had four sons, at least one of whom, all assumed, would one day win high office. It didn’t happen. The same thing occurred with his young cousin Franklin (and his niece Eleanor), who also had four sons, three of whom lusted for office.

For the twelve years after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, it was taken as fact that Edward M. Kennedy could have the White House whenever he wanted. In 1980 he ran against a stunningly weak Democratic incumbent and lost.

Meanwhile, George W. Bush lost in his first bid for Congress. His brother Jeb lost in his first bid to be Florida’s governor. Their father lost often: He lost a run for the Senate in 1970 to Lloyd Bentsen, a run for the Republican nomination in 1980 to Reagan, and his run for reelection as president twelve years after that. Despite a massive investment of money and effort over the past nineteen years, the Kennedys have, in the third generation, exactly one minor member of Congress, who does not seem likely to rise very far. His cousin Joe, once thought a star, has been forced out of politics. His cousin Kathleen, with a huge war chest and a friendly electorate, lost a bid to become governor of Maryland in 2002.

HISTORY TELLS US that while dynastic heirs have a huge incoming advantage in connections, money, and sentiment, they fail when they reach above their own level of competence and come falling quickly to earth. Dynastic heirs never rise without serious talent. Oddly enough, in “American Dynasty” Phillips names James Madison and John Adams as two founding Americans who would have been appalled by the rise of the Bushes. But in their day and age, they were the Bushes: Madison, like his friend Thomas Jefferson, was the son of a very rich land-owning family who inherited his social prestige and political influence. And John Adams was sire of our very first political dynasty, first of two Adamses to serve as president, first of three Adamses to serve as ambassador to Great Britain.

One of the greatest strengths of the American nation is that it has always been able, from its very inception, to draw on the talents of all classes of people: not just Alexander Hamilton, the déclassé, illegitimate, penniless immigrant, or John Adams, the middle-class man from New England, or George Washington, the son of a minor planter who rose with the help of his rich, titled in-laws–but also those, like Jefferson and Madison, who were born, in effect, on home plate.

Did Simeon II have to face the Iowa caucuses? Did Charles II run against Richard Cromwell? Did Victor Emmanuel have to debate? Our worst presidents have been neither dynastic nor moneyed; and the privileged have, all in all, fared rather well. The country had less to fear from George Bush or John F. Kennedy than from Lyndon Johnson and Richard M. Nixon–poor boys who fought their way up from the bottom, who were so deranged by their envy of the likes of the Bushes and Kennedys that it seems to have driven them nuts.

Something of the sort also seems to have happened to Phillips, whose “American Dynasty” defies sense and reason.

Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.