All in the Family
GLASS, ANDREW J.
All in the Family American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush By Kevin Phillips Viking. 397 pp. $25.95. Reviewed by Andrew J. Glass Managing...
...Reviewed by Andrew J. Glass Managing editor, the "Hill" John F. Kennedy had a wicked quasipublic sense of humor...
...For that matter, Phillips also lacks a light touch as he recounts the Bushes' aptitude for old-boy networking—at Yale's Skull and Bones Society, on Wall Street, in the clubby Senate and in murky CIA dealings...
...Despite Phillips' best efforts, they promise to pay scant attention to Bush's patrician upbringing and the hidden agendas of his well-connected forebears...
...He won't...
...But rather than making his points with a scalpel, Phillips wields a blunderbuss...
...The more recent of Phillips' 10 previous books examine the role of elites in major economic powers—a theme he further developed in Wealth and Democracy, published last year...
...Given the grief that Edward Kennedy, who attended the dedication, has bestowed upon the White House over Bush's judicial nominees and other cherished legislation, the ceremony may have well marked the zenith of the relationship between the dynasties...
...What now seems far-fetched is earlier speculation that he might join the six or eight of the second tier...
...Putting the nation's respiratory state aside, the Bushes still have some competition in the dynastic department, given the legislative heft of Democratic Senator Edward M. Kennedy ofMassachusetts, now buttressed by that family's newly minted California gubernatorial ties...
...That sort of easy wit appears to be lacking in the four generations of the Bush family that KevinPhillips examines in American Dynasty—with emphasis on 41 and 43, as the former President and the current one, his son, are known in this book and in the White House...
...Phillips had no use for Reagan, not to mention his Yale-bred Vice President...
...To illustrate the American dynastic experience, Phillips recalls how in 2001 George W Bush "dedicated the new U.S...
...Privately, Bush dismisses Phillips as "one of those guys who's missing a chromosome...
...Two years later, that is what Phillips charges...
...When I covered him in 1962, a decade after he entered the Senate, he had the demeanor of a consummate Yankee gentleman of a moderate GOP hue rarely seen these days on that side of the aisle...
...I can help the party most by doing my job [as governor]," he told me at the time...
...But, as Times columnist David Brooks has noted, the divisions in America are largely cultural, not economic...
...There is a duality in Phillips' background that needs to be addressed as well...
...They must be obscure, since they didn't come up when Queen Elizabeth II welcomed President Bush during his November 18-21 state visit to London...
...As the New York Times noted in an editorial at the time, "outsiders have accused the two families of using each other politically, a charge it would be hard for either to deny...
...I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for a landslide...
...A promotion flier from his publisher asserts that he has written "a potentially ruinous exposé of America's first family as the nation holds its breath for the 2004 Presidential election...
...It is the author's thesis that the Bush family rose to prominence through its interlocking involvement in intelligence matters dating back to World War I, and through its ties to energy moguls of both the Texas and Middle East variety...
...No serious observer ever thought that an actor from Hollywood would make it into the first tier along with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and perhaps Franklin D. Roosevelt," he wrote in 1987...
...With no facetious intent, he dubs the Bushes "our 'not-quite-royal-family'" in this book, citing obscure ties to the British monarchy...
...The author is, in fact, a radical populist historian and erstwhile political commentator who envisions the United States as a plutocracy in the mold of the Florentine Medicis—a nation ruled, and brought to the brink of ruin, by the rich...
...IN THE ensuing years, though, Phillips shed all traces of his conservative past, including his advisory role to President Richard M. Nixon...
...The Reds vote for Bush because they identify with his cultural values...
...Then there is Democratic Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, maneuvering from her present perch to recapture the White House in due course—or, maybe, sooner...
...Actually, it is not "new...
...The book jacket identifies Phillips as a "former Republican strategist," which is akin to identifying George W. Bush as a "former Air Force pilot...
...There are a number of people that would be good Presidents," Gingrich said...
...He brands Prescott W. Bush, the President's grandfather, a nefarious figure deeply immersed in prewar pro-Nazi conspiracies to feather his already ample financial nest...
...It's the same one where Bobby Kennedy roamed the halls in the early 1960s, although it has been spruced up and fortified, in the wake of the terrorist attacks, to withstand the worst-case scenarios of the FBI and outside consultants...
...He confesses that "inasmuch the elder Bush turned me into a political independent, I have to admit that I can no longer attribute my own unhappiness with the dynastic, economic, religious, and war politics of George W. Bush to my earlier Republican molding alone...
...41—plus, of course, what the book calls "the restoration...
...As a Presidential candidate in 1960, he sought to defuse the political downside of his dynastic roots by appearing in the requisite whitetie-and-tails before the Gridiron Club, an elite group of 60 Washington-based journalists...
...Some television producers must have him freeze-framed in their minds as the author (in 1969) of The Emerging Republican Majority, an insightful analysis of demographic trends and national moods at the close of the turbulent '60s...
...He suggests that the elder Bush used PULL to get his son off the hook from a cocaine possession charge and have the record expunged in return for his community service...
...Along the way, he recounts how 41 and 43 shed their patrician roots and recast themselves as hardscrabble oil wildcatters and good ol' boys...
...American Dynasty raises the flag of class-based politics for the 2004 election and beyond...
...Middle Eastern policy and attach faith healers to the advisory structure oftheUS.Food and Drug Administration...
...As the wealth of the plutocrats has grown, he argues, so has their control over every aspect of government, to the detriment of the public good...
...Bush, having been re-elected to a second term as governor of Texas, did not himself believe he was one of them...
...On political talk shows Phillips is still cast at times as an iconoclastic conservative...
...In a similar vein, Phillips reports that in 1972 George W.'s father got him ajob working with minority kids in a nonprofit organization known as Professionals United for Leadership League (PULL...
...Instead, we got eight years of Ronald Reagan and four more of No...
...Could he be concerned about being outflanked by Kitty Kelley, whose highly unauthorized biography of the Bush dynasty is also in the works...
...The divide pits the urban, cosmopolitan and liberal culture of both coasts—what Brooks and the TV networks call "Blue America"—against the conservative, church-going, gun-owning, patriotic, and mainly white culture of "Red America...
...Was Joseph P. Kennedy, his multimillionaire father, spending too much money on his campaign, he asked selfdeprecatingly...
...he thought he would be abetter one...
...Gingrich declined to tout Bush early on as a candidate...
...Phillips makes much of George W Bush being a Yalie, like his father and grandfather...
...He questioned whether governors generally were capable of offering adequate leadership on the national level...
...While hiding their true colors, Phillips maintains, the clan leveraged its financial and social clout to attain political office, a process he considers an inherent subversion of democracy...
...Whatever he may lack, he manages to clearly demonstrate that George W., far from being a "compassionate conservative," remains a diehard ideologue with little desire to concede any ground on the issues dear to his core constituency...
...Tight old-boy networks, he finds, usually play a large role in keeping elites in power...
...Perhaps that is because what we see in George W Bush's body language is merely his unnatural strut, apparently adopted to reflect a purposeful Presidential bearing, and his irrepressible smirk, first introduced in the 2000 campaign debates with Vice President Al Gore...
...He also says, without direct evidence, that Bush "helped to force" House Speaker Newt Gingrich out of office after the 199 8 election...
...Those portraits, though, never come into sharp focus...
...JFK waved a mock telegram from his father that read: "Don't buy a single vote more than necessary...
...In doing so, he grew increasingly pessimistic about the longterm prospects of conservatism...
...As it turned out, he was wrong in thinking the political fires Nixon lit in 1968 would shortly burn themselves out, to be succeeded by fresh liberal flames...
...Justice Department building named for former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy...
...You would not know from his book that 43 spent the better part of 25 years denigrating the elitism and snobbery he said he found in New Haven, before relenting when Barbara, one of his twin daughters, entered the class of 2004...
...He sees the post-Nixon GOP that Bush sits athwart as "dangerously dominated by Southern fundamentalist and evangelical constituencies, willing to blend biblical theology into U.S...
Vol. 86 • November 2003 • No. 6
