American dynasty aristocracy, fortune, and the politics of deceit in the house of Bush

PREFACE This book has changed a lotóin length, indignation, and its hitherto unpublished informationósince I began writing it in December 2002. My original ambition was to identify and explain the Bush-related transformation of the U.S. presidency into an increasingly dynastic office, a change with profound consequences for the American Republic, given the factors of family bias, domestic special interests, and foreign grudges that the Bushes, father and son, brought into the White House. Unfortunately, in examining two Bush presidencies and the familyís four-generation pursuit of national prominence and poweróand in doing so through a lens that highlighted elite associations, dynastic ambitions, and recurring financial and business practicesóI found a greater basis for dismay and disillusionment than I had imagined. The result is an unusual and unflattering portrait of a great family (great in power, not morality) that has built a base over the course of the twentieth century in the back corridors of the new military-industrial complex and in close association with the growing intelligence and national security establishments. In doing so, the Bushes have threaded their way through damning political, banking, and armanents scandals and, since the 1980s, controversies like the October Surprise, Iran-Contra, and Iraqgate imbroglios, which in another climate or a different time might have led to impeachment. I am not talking about ordinary lack of business ethics or financial corruption. During the late twentieth century, several other presidents and their families displayed these shortcomings, and the public has become understandably blasÈ. Four generations of building toward dynasty, however, have infused the Bush familyís hunger for power and practices of crony capitalism with a moral arrogance and backstage disregard of the democratic and republican traditions of the U.S. government. As we will see, four generations of involvement with clandestine arms deals and European and Middle Eastern rogue banks will do that. American Dynasty is on the one hand a book about economics, history, and politics in the era that covers the two Bush presidencies. But it is also a portrait of four Bush (and Walker) generationsótheir ambitions, financial practices, scandals, and wars. It brings into focus many circumstances and relationships that have not previously been examined together and seriously discussed, for reasons that are both unusual and unfortunate. During the late 1970s and 1980s, the Bush clan in a sense flew under the radar of critical biography and investigation. The first two published biographies of George H. W. Bushó George Bush: A Biography (1980) by Nicholas King, a former Bush press secretary, and George Bush: An Intimate Portrait (1989) by Fitzhugh Green, a CIA-connected Bush social chumówere friendly treatments that had no room for warts. Neither did the 1991 Flight of the Avenger sequence of books lionizing his record in World War II. Unfortunately, this puffery managed to preempt more serious book-length exploration. The first major objective study, Marching in Place (1992), by Time reporters Dan Goodgame and Michael Duffy, dwelt critically on his 1989ñ92 presidential record but came out too late to affect the political climate that defeated Bush in 1992, and it got little attention. George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography , published in 1992 by allies of Bush-hating Lyndon LaRouche, tended to submerge its massive, and often revelatory, research in snowdrifts of paranoia, and no serious readers or reviewers gave it much credence. By 2000, naturally, biographies of the younger Bush, even critical ones, devoted little attention to anything other than his own career. Thus the first three generations of the family escaped multidimensional and skeptical scrutiny, save for a professional, but essentially friendly, biography by historian Herbert Parmet entitled George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee (1997). Now that the Bushes have become a presidential dynasty, for however long, they will command more probing attention, but the national interest would have been better served had that occurred in the 1970s. Few have looked at the facts of the familyís rise, but just as important, commentators have neglected the thread ónot the mere occasionóof special interests, biases, scandals (especially those related to arms dealing), and blatant business cronyism. The evidence that accrues over four generations is extraordinarily damning. This is especially true of the Bushesí ties to the Wall Street financial world and the military-industrial complex. But considering an additional relationship may explain even more. After four generations of connection to foreign intrigue and the intelligence community, plus three generations of immersion in the culture of secrecy (dating back to the Yale years of several men in the family), deceit and disinformation have become Bush political hallmarks. The Middle Eastern financial ties of both Bush presidents exemplify this lack of candor, as do the origins and machinations of both Bush wars with Iraq. Appendix B in this volume reviews the familyís penchant for secrecy and for cleaning and locking up government records. It doesnít help that the major media have tended to use kid gloves with the family. In 1999, longtime reporter Robert Sherrill, writing in the Texas Observer , contrasted this treatment of the Bushes with how ìwhen Richard Nixonís brother Donaldómy poor, damn dumb brother, Nixon called himóused his name to pry a loan of $205,000 from billionaire Howard Hughes, the mainstream press raised a stink that lasted years.î The Bushes have also benefited from the Democratsí apparent reluctance to investigate the connections, misdeeds, and malfeasances of a popular president such as George W. Bush. Others have made the point that if a Clinton-era special counsel was necessary for Whitewater, why not a Bush-era special counsel for Enron? As a former longtime Republican who came of political age during the Nixon years, I take the point about double standards. My own distaste since the 1960s for what George H. W. Bush seemed to representóa career built on support from a vague ìeliteî rather than merit or democratic selectionóhad a Republican genesis. It drew on views prominently, although not decisively, voiced within the GOP. Dwight D. Eisenhower had warnedóin words quoted in this volumeís opening pagesóabout the future threat that might come from the military-industrial complex. Richard Nixonís dislike of Bushís elitist economics leaped out in an endorsement Nixon made of my 1990 book, The Politics of Rich and Poor . Ronald Reagan had personal qualms about his running mate that some say he never lost. Fellow Texans John Connally and H. Ross Perot were both disdainful of Bush. John McCain kept this tradition alive in his 2000 view of the younger Bush. Few prominent Republicans voiced similar qualms as the campaign for the election of 2004 began. Moreover, inasmuch as 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. I must also acknowledge that the party of my youth and middle age has changed enormously. For fifteen years after I published The Emerging Republican Majority in 1969, I supported the GOP campaign argument that public policy had gone too far in trying to squeeze religion out of American life. Now the voter backlash against that early squeeze has so reversed the national discussion that the opposite threat is crystallizing: there is a Republican Party dangerously dominated by southern fundamentalist and evangelical constituencies, willing to blend biblical theology into U.S. Middle Eastern policy and attach faith healers to the advisory structure of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The research I did on politics and religion in writing chapter 7 was a revelation to me, as I hope it will be to readers. That the Bushes have many qualities to commend them as a private familyócommunity involvement, generosity to those who work for themóis not really the point. They are not a private family. They are a public family, and one that is writing a new definition of the presidency. They are bending public policy toward family grudges and interests. What matters is their policy and conduct in that emerging role. The further evidence, since 9/11, of the United Statesí becoming an embattled imperium, even showing faint specklings of garrison state thinking, only doubles the stakes. True, the dynastic trend in the United States goes deeper than the Bushes. If Hillary Clinton runs for president in 2008, the failings and lingering grudges of her familyís own would-be dynasty will be fair game. And thus we may learnófor better or worseómore about the transformation and perils of American politics. This book, however, is about the dynasty we already have and what it stands for. This is the direction in which national politics and national discussion must turn first. 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. Bushís popularity and when the war of early spring 2003 displayed his personal commitment to resuming his fatherís unfinished combat with Iraqís 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 biasóin 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. Bushís 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 fatherís term but to the Ford administration of 1974ñ76, a virtual incubator of the Republican Partyís 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 presidentsófrenetic activity, scrambled speech, the hint of dyslexic arrangements of thought.1 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 ìwent 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.î 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 massósuch as the exposure in 1942 of Prescott Bushís corporate directorship links to wartime Germany, which harked back to overambitious 1920s investment banking; the Bush familyís longtime involvement with global armaments and the military-industrial complex; and a web of close connections to the CIA, which began decades before George Bushís 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 ìparanoid streakî in American politics. (Try a Google Internet search for ìGeorge Bush and Hitler,î 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 nationís ìestablishmentî to its zenith is invariably an accretive process, not a successfully executed sequence of plots. Still, ìold-boyî networks 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. Likewise, dealing separately with the administrations of George H. W. and George W.óor worse, ignoring commonalities of behavior in officeóis 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 financeóin several cases, the investment side of the petroleum businessóhelps to explain their recurrent preoccupation with investments, capital gains, and tax shelters. George W. Bushís 2003 commitment to ending taxation of dividends was simply an extension of his fatherís frequent calls for reducing capital gains tax rates as the solution to any weakness in the national economy. Third, the familyís ties to oil date back to Ohio steelmaker Samuel Bushís 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. Bushís 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 ìdynasticî 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 fatherís 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 fatherís 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 fatherís 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 ìrestorationî 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 electorateópollster Gallup came to call them ìthe repulsedîówith 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 ìBush era,î lasting from George H. W. Bushís triumph in 1988 through 2008, the two family presidencies might well define the entire two decades, turning the Clinton years into 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 Britainís 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 1996ñ98 jelling among Republicans of a commitment, backstopped by favorable national polls, to running the Bush familyís 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 1993ñ94 by ongoing revelations of Clintonís 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 worldís population, especially its poor and dispossessed, was participating in a quite dissimilar expressionóa 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 ìfamilyî issues propounded in the cultural politics of the 1980s and 1990sómost 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 ìfamily-relatedî 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, ìfamilyî bred dynasties and elite entrenchment. Even more broadly, amid the fear of additional barbarian attacks in the 9/11 vein, Americans slid toward another historical reversal: allowing the eighteenth-century republic to be reconceptualized 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 weíre 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 elitesó 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 postñWorld War II emergence of the CIA and rise of the national security state. Until now, our political history has embodied a different, midcentury-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 different national story. The Bushes and their initially more influential Walker family in-laws were also ìpresent at the creation,î to use Achesonís 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 nationís 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 entourageóand 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 Bushís family connections, gung ho spirit, personal likability, and social outreach. Similar considerations helped to guide President Fordís 1975 selection of him to head the CIA, a famous repository of Yale alumni. Bush wanted to beóand perhaps wasótaken 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 grandfathersóGeorge Herbert Walker, a well-connected St. Louis financier, and Samuel Prescott Bush, a wealthy Ohio railroad equipment manufactureróhad 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 ìnot-quite-royal family.î Iím not being facetious here. The Bush royal connections documented in Burkeís Peerage and elsewhere have nourished the self-image of both chief executives. However, the real founding father of the Bush clan was not a Bush, but a WalkeróGeorge 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 midcenturyórich, 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 ìpermanent governmentî akin to the British model. Although this establishment peaked from the 1920s through the 1950s, its influence lingered, to George H. W. Bushís 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. Pseudoaristocratic 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 BloomingdaleísñMetropolitan Museumñ 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 1660ñ61 and the France of 1814ñ15 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 electorateís overthrow of George Bush in 1992 brought in Bill Clinton. However, Clintonís 1993ñ94 moral disrepute, peaking with his 1998ñ99 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 Streetñbased reasons. When Bush took office in 2001, a parallel to Stuart and Bourbon arrogance quickly emerged in the new regimeís 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 1ís 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 Texanomicsóits 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 familyís 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 stateís 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 economicsóconfirmed by official data on environmental quality, education, and income distributionóhas obliged the familyís presidential office seekers to wear ìkinder and gentlerî policies and ìcompassionate conservatismî as velvet cloaking. Chapter 5 moves from the duality of harshness-cum-compassion to the 2001ñ4 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 Cheneyís 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 militaryñnational securityñ industrial complexófrom World War I through the tumult of the twentieth century to the complexís 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 dynastyófrom Samuel Bush, George Walker, and Prescott Bush through George H. W. Bushóand 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 2001ñ4 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 Statesópolls 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 symbolismódemonstrates that not all of the worldís 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 ìAxis of Evilî 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. ìcrusader stateî stands to profit important economic interests even as it pleases religious fundamentalists. Chapter 9, ìThe Wars of the Texas Succession,î 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 Reaganís vice president and then as president himself. They also reflected a two-generation Texan preoccupation with U.S. Middle Eastern and Caspian oil interests. ìThe War of the Texas Successionî 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 nationís 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. PART I Family, Dynasty, and Restoration Ab CHAPTER 1 The Not-Quite-Royal Family It is hardly too early to examine the nature of the Bush dynasty, and whyóat the moment at leastóit has largely escaped the antagonism that led the founders to fear any hereditary titles. Such sentiment prompted political foes to compare the Adamses to the Stuart kings of Britain and the Kennedysí adversaries to warn that eight years of Jack, eight years of Bobby and eight years of Ted would, after all, conclude in the Orwellian 1984. New York Times , 2002 Most dynasties are defined and circumscribed by region. The Roosevelts rode as high and far as the national fortunes of New York State....The Kennedys acquire an outlier state or three, but Massachusetts remains their feudal domain. Not the Bushes. Their success is found in an essential rootlessness. Washington Post , 2001 The power of the American presidencyóand, for that matter, its awesome centrality in the worldó burgeoned in the first years of the twenty-first century, especially after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. An earlier muscle flexing during the peak years of the cold war with the Soviet Union had led to the imperial presidency of the 1960s. That culminated in Watergate, and the stature of the president understandably weakened after the scandal. The unnerving crisis of a terrorist attack within its borders led the United States to a new sense of empire and disdain for international restraints. Sweeping doctrine was involved, going far beyond the ad hoc White House grasping of the sixties. Another distinctive feature of the turn-of-the-century mood was its sudden turn to esteeming family and inheritanceóthe election of a man with the same looks, name, manner, and party as his ex-presidential father, chosen through a process that wound up traducing the democratic will of the American electorate. In 2000, George W. Bush became the first president since 1888 who had not won at least a plurality of the popular votes. After losing by more than five hundred thousand ballots, he was chosen by a four-vote margin in the electoral college, courtesy of a 5ñ4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. Most twentieth-century presidents put in office by tight margins sought to be conciliatory to make up for want of a popular mandate. Not the Bush administration. Eschewing any inhibition based on lack of national consent or legitimacy, it governed from the start with an ideological edge. Family credentials and a powerful financial donor network had been the basis of the new presidentís nomination, and family connections quickly became a fount of federal appointments, including two for children of the five pro- Bush Supreme Court justices: Janet Rehnquist, daughter of the chief justice, became inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, while Eugene Scalia, son of Justice Antonin Scalia, became solicitor of the Department of Labor.1 Other important party families likewise enjoyed favor. The Bush White House helped to anoint Elizabeth Dole, wife of the GOPís 1996 presidential nominee, for nomination and election as U.S. senator from North Carolina. Colin Powell, who might have contended for the 2000 nomination himself, became secretary of state and saw his son named chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. The twenty-eight-year-old son of Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina was nominated for U.S. attorney in that state, despite being just three years out of law school. Old Bush loyalists returned to Washington like exiled Stuarts flocking back to the London of Charles II in 1660. Richard Cheney, defense secretary in the previous Bush regime, was now vice president. Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney had, respectively, been chief of staff and deputy chief of staff in the Ford White House of 1975. Rumsfeld, who had also been secretary of defense in 1976, came back to the Pentagon a quarter century later. Andrew Card, whose relations with the senior George Bush dated to the Republican National Committee of 1972, was appointed White House chief of staff. Karl Rove, a political aide to the Bushes over the same period, took up the post of chief White House political adviser. The imperial presidency of the 1960s had also bred dynastic loyalty. John F. Kennedy was scarcely in office before he named his brother Robert as U.S. attorney general and managed to pass his Massachusetts Senate seat to his youngest brother, Edward, who only just met the age requirement. But neither of the brothers succeeded in his own later presidential bidóRobert Kennedy fell to an assassinís bullet in 1968, while Edward Kennedy was defeated by incumbent Jimmy Carter in the 1980 Democratic presidential primaries. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, the other two incumbents sharing the imperial zenith, might have been tempted to follow suit, save that their brothers were neíer-do-wells and their only children were daughters. The result was to leave the dynastic presidency to make its appearance almost without warning, to a nation preoccupied with the millennium and a bursting stock market bubble. A Confusion of Dynasties George W. Bush doubtless found renewed discussion of the dynasty issue an acceptable price tag of his political victory in the 2002 elections. But a probing spotlight had been turned on. The New York Times , above the fold on the front of its November 10, 2002, ìWeek in Reviewî section, blazoned a half-page color picture of Air Force One with the simple, stark legend: ìDefying Expectations, a Bush Dynasty Begins to Look Real.î Not so, replied Republican pollsters: Rather than perceiving the continuity of a dynasty, the public viewed presidents number forty-one and number forty-three as separate entities. More candor had come from the Bushes themselves, both pËre et fils , almost two years earlier. On inauguration day, George H. W. Bush had jokingly referred to his son as ìQuincy,î reminding everyone that he was not the first presidentís son to succeed to the republican purple. The former president later furnished a laudatory quote for a book conveniently entitled Americaís First Dynasty: The Adamses, 1735ñ1918 .2 The Adamses, however, do not furnish a meaningful analogy. A quarter of a century separated the two presidents, and Quincy (as he is familiarly known) was put in office by a different political party from his fatherís. Nothing about his controversial election (by the House of Representatives) fortified his office, which he lost after one term. Still, the Adams example was welcomed in Bush-era Washington: See, father- and-son presidencies are as American as apple pie! A Kennedy analogy was also at hand. Early in 2001, George W. Bush invited the Kennedy family to a preview of Thirteen Days , a movie about the 1961 Cuban missile crisis. In November, he dedicated the new U.S. Justice Department building named for former attorney general Robert Kennedy; Senator Edward Kennedy, in attendance, expressed his pleasure. The message was unsubtle: Democrats, too, have dynasties. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison would not have rested that easy in 1789 or in 1800, when memory was fresh of overthrowing a king in the American Revolution. The hint of a hereditary chief executive would have been inflammatory. But by 2001, ten generations had passed since the debates of the early Republic. By the late twentieth century, thinkers had begun to posit that American voters, in ceremoniously choosing and inducting a president, were actually in psychological hot pursuit of a king. Public attitudes had been further conditioned by the familiarity of media-bestowed titles of democratic ìroyaltyîódukes of the baseball diamond and queens of country music. The loss of John F. Kennedy Jr. in a 1999 airplane crash was treated as the death of a royal prince. The peril that this popular-culture royalism might carry over into the selection of leaders was ignored beyond political science seminars. The 2000 election gave new impetus to dynasticism. Besides the Supreme Courtís role and the implications of the second Bushís being chosen just eight years after his father and by the same party establishment, genealogy had become a national hobby. Americans looking for great-great-grandparents were thronging records offices from Donegal and East Anglia to Palermo. The Bushes themselves proudly drew attention to their English royal blood, a lineage upheld by the arbiters in London. John Adams, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, would have choked; John F. Kennedy, grandson of a Boston saloonkeeper, would have heard Irish ghosts laughing uproariously. The two Georges, however, cherished their Plantagenet and Tudor forebears. Early biographies of George H. W. Bush stressed the seventeenth-century New England roots on both the Bush and Walker sides of the family, alleging that Senator Prescott Bush and his family descended from English king Henry III. Then, after George H. W. had won the 1988 presidential election, London-based Burkeís Peerage , the worldís authority on royal lineage, all but bowed. Harold Brooks-Baker, publishing director of Burkeís, allowed that some other U.S. presidents had royal connections, ìbut none as royal as George Bush.î Rather than to Henry III, he traced Bushís family history to Mary, the sister of King Henry VIII, who became part of the Bush family tree by wedding the duke of Suffolk.3 Queen Elizabeth, Brooks-Baker pronounced, was thus the presidentís distant cousin. In 2002, an American company, MyFamily.com, also traced George W. Bush and Winston Churchill to a common ancestor, fifteenth-century Northamptonshire squire Henry Spencer.4 This pleased the second President Bush, who had placed a bust of Churchill on his desk in 2001. To call the Bushes a ìnot-quite-royal familyî captures the between-ness of their position. While no American presidential family can actually be royalóthe Constitution, to begin with, specifies that ìNo title of nobility shall be granted by the United Statesîóthe Bushesí triple predilection for royal genealogy, restoration, and an unacknowledged dynasty is an extraordinary coincidence. Biographers have also been reminded that Barbara (Pierce) Bush is descended from the fourteenth president, Franklin Pierce, which gives her son presidential genes on both sides of his family. Barbara Bush said of her eldest son in 2000 that ìhe should be president,î at least implying his descent as a credential. The chairman of the 2000 Republican presidential campaign, Donald Evans, went so far as to call the Bushes ìAmericaís Family.î Certainly they have appeared to presume entitlement. Before Prescott Bush was elected to the U.S. Senate from Connecticut in 1952, he had decided that a mere seat in the House of Representatives was not worth giving up his managing partnership at Brown Brothers Harriman for. Five or so years after Prescott Bush went to the Senate, George H. W. Bushís nascent ambitions seem to have locked in on that same upper house, hoping for a family continuity. Stephen Hess, who in 1966 published the book Americaís Political Dynasties , thirty-six years later agreed that the Bushes should be considered a dynasty, but an ìaccidentalî one. True enough, in the sense that the accident of Bill Clintonís moral shortcomings and impeachment may have been a precondition for Bushís accession in 2000. Even so, the speed and seriousness of the familyís efforts to make George W. Bush governor of Texas in 1994 and to do likewise for his brother in Florida more than hinted at its higher goals. Goaded by their fatherís defeat, the next generation of Bushes laid plans to come back. The Founding Father: George Herbert Walker There is more of George Herbert Walker than of anyone else in the names of both George Herbert Walker Bush, his grandson, and George Walker Bush, his great-grandson. We may say the same of his role in the Bush familyís midcentury success. In 2003, George H. W. Bush provided material for a laudatory book about his father, Prescott Bush, identifying him as the first U.S. senator to be both father and grandfather of a president. In this case, ìlegacyî was the term he preferred to ìdynasty.î Financially, however, George H. Walker, a generation older, was the clanís founding father, much as Joseph P. Kennedy was the economic enabler of his political brood. Some in the Walker family implied the same, emphasizing how much attention and career assistance George Herbert Walker and George Herbert Walker II gave to two generations of Bushes. Both the Walkers and the Bushes were old and prosperous families even in the midñnineteenth century. The first Bush to attend Yale was the forty-third presidentís great-great-grandfather, James Smith Bush, in the 1850s. He went on to become an Episcopalian minister in Staten Island, New York, and his son, Samuel Prescott Bush, learned engineering at nearby Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. The Walkers were wealthier, though. Great-great-grandfather David Walker had built the largest dry goods import firm west of the Mississippi. Much of his business was with Britain, where he also sent his son, George Herbert Walker, to school during the 1880s. For political reasons, office seekers in the Bush family have frequently misrepresented their social and economic status. Senator Prescott Bush pretended that modest income kept his father from sending him to law school after he graduated from Yale in 1913. George H. W. Bush purported to have ìinterviewedî for his first job. George W. Bush chose to portray himself as a young man molded and Texified by San Jacinto Junior High School. The historian Herbert Parmet, in his biography George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee , described the tactical genesis of this class denial: Prescottís recorded reminiscences, given in 1966, present, somewhat disingenuously, a hint of genteel poverty, undoubtedly a habit cultivated by one who had spent the bulk of his previous two decades canvassing for votes among ordinary people. To deny the realities of his background, the stature of his father as a leading industrialist of the day, was consistent with perpetuating the myth of the self-made man. Prescott had been a U.S. Senator from Connecticut at the time he gave the interview and was practiced at minimizing his pedigree. He claimed that his father did not have enough money to put him through law school, a notion of financial limitations not only at variance with his career and lifestyle but also one strongly rejected by those who knew anything about him.5 In fact, Samuel Bush had become wealthy as the president of Buckeye Steel Castings, a railroad- equipment-manufacturing firm, which he headed from 1908 until his retirement in 1927. It was a fair-sized steel plant, sprawling across many acres and specializing in railroad couplings and other steel castings needed by the large Morgan-, Harriman-, and Rockefeller-controlled rail systems. Frank Rockefeller, the brother of John D. and William, who went into Great Lakes iron ore and steel, preceded Samuel Bush as Buckeyeís president from 1906 to 1908.6 Through Buckeye, Bush had ties to the Rockefeller family, with its Standard Oil and National City Bank holdings. Prominent in Ohio railroading as well as steel, Bush became a director of the Pennsylvania Railroadís Ohio subsidiaries, of the Hocking Valley Railway and the Norfolk and Western Railway, and of the Huntington National Bank. From 1917 to 1918 he served on the War Industries Board, where he was in charge of the forgings, guns, small arms, and ammunition section and later the facilities division. Besides founding the Ohio Tax League, Bush became the first president of the National Association of Manufacturers and a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. He built an imposing house with lavish gardens in the Columbus suburb of Bexley and sent his children east to boarding schoolóthe girls to Connecticutís Westover, the boys (including Prescott) to Episcopalian St. Georgeís in Newport, Rhode Island. The family spent summers in fashionable seaside Watch Hill, Rhode Island.7 Several hundred miles away in St. Louis, George H. Walker was becoming richer. By 1914, his investment firm, G. H. Walker and Company, founded in 1900, had become one of the more important in the Mississippi Valley. The principal history of U.S. investment banking has described the forces involved: ìDuring the first decade or so of the 20th century the supply of domestic capital seeking investment also grew rapidly. Between 1900 and 1910, banking assets more than doubled, increasing from $10.7 billion to $22.4 billion, and many country banks in the Middle and Far West, which previously had invested almost exclusively in farm mortgages, started buying railroad, industrial and utility bonds....The increase in funds for investment led to a growing interest in securities throughout the country.î8 Walker got off to a quick start by buying and reselling companies like Laclede Gas and the New Orleans, Texas and Mexico Railroad.9 Success with various railroads in and around Texasóalso including the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexican, as well as several local lines absorbed into the Burlington and Santa Fe systemsóbrought Walker to the notice of E. H. Harriman, owner of the vast Union Pacific system; his son Averell; and Texas judge Robert S. Lovett, who took charge of the UP after E. H. Harrimanís death in 1909. Walkerís English schooling and relationships also piqued the interest of J. P. Morgan and Company, which took some of his underwritings and used his firm in securities syndicates. St. Louis, at that time, was the major financial center in the south-central United States and the nationís fifth- ranked city in investment banking. The Republican Party preference Walker would display during the 1920s was hidden in his earlier St. Louis career. He was involved in both business deals, including the 1904 St. Louis Worldís Fair, and Democratic mayoral politics alongside two other well-known figuresóexñMissouri governor David Francis, later (1893ñ96) secretary of the interior, and millionaire St. Louis businessman Robert Brookings, who would go on to found Washingtonís Brookings Institution. When war broke out in Europe, Walkerís connection to the House of Morgan became profitable; when the United States entered World War I in 1917, his connections to Francis, Brookings, Harriman, and Lovett became invaluable. Steadfastly isolationist, parts of Missouri remained opposed to entering the conflict even after Washington declared war. Dozens of townships were still German-speaking. Not a few banks refused to participate in marketing British bonds. Such views were not shared by Walker and his pro-British friends. J. P. Morgan and Company, chosen in 1914 by Britain and France as their commercial agent for purchasing war supplies in the United States, carried out this function by establishing within the firm its famous Export Department under Morgan partner Edward Stettinius Sr. George H. Walker, with his knowledge of midwestern industrial production and railroad transportation, took on a minor but lucrative regional advisory role. Allied wartime purchases through Morgan ultimately came to $3.2 billion, a staggering sum more than four times the entire U.S. federal budget in 1914.10 When the United States finally entered the war, British purchases no longer went through Morgan but were handled by the Allied Purchasing Commission affiliated with the War Industries Board. Walkerís luck was such that Robert Brookings went to Washington to become chairman of that boardís Price-Fixing Committee. Judge Lovett, in turn, took over as the boardís priorities commissioner. In addition, Brookings and Lovett also served as two of the three board members of the Allied Purchasing Commission. Chairman Bernard Baruch was the third.11 David Francis, appointed in 1916 as Woodrow Wilsonís ambassador to Russia, occupied another privileged position in the web of wartime information and munitions contracts. The title of a recent biography of Francis, Standing on a Volcano , referred to his task of hammering out a commercial treaty with Russia, as well as advising on U.S. bank loans to the Russian government. In 1917, on his advice, the United States gave the Russian revolutionary government under Aleksandr Kerensky a $325 million credit, to be spent on war matÈriel from the United States.12 George Walker kept in touch with Brookings, Lovett, and Francis, exchanging information, influencing war contracts, and placing friends and acquaintances in jobs from Washington to St. Petersburg. Future partner Averell Harriman, for his part, put aside railroading to build ships for the war effort, setting up near Philadelphia with a contract to construct forty freighters for the federal Emergency Shipping Corporation.13 Not surprisingly, he remained in contact with his fellow wheeler-dealer. In 1919, convinced to direct his postwar ambitions toward Germany and Russia, Harriman persuaded the ubiquitous ìBertî Walker to become president of a new Wall Street investment banking firm, W. A. Harriman and Company, being organized by the Harriman family with the collaboration of the Rockefeller- headed National City Bank and the Morgan-connected Guaranty Trust. Besides helping to guide the Harriman railroad interests, Walker would backstop Averell Harrimanís own grand plans, which ranged from a participation in Germanyís once-proud Hamburg-Amerika steamship line to oil and manganese interests in the Russian Caucasus. Walker moved to New York, and for more than a decade not only helped to run W. A. Harriman and Company but helped to direct separate Harriman personal and family investment vehicles like the Harriman Fifteen Corporation, the Silesian-American Corporation, and Harriman International. These, it would turn out, would be the more controversial enterprises. St. Louis newspapers described Walker in awed terms as the man responsible for assembling Harrimanís overseas empire.14 In 1904, Walker and his father had built a summerhouse on what became Walkerís Point in Kennebunkport, Maine, where they had begun vacationing in the 1890s. George Walkerís eldest and favorite child, Dorothy, was born there in 1901. By the end of the 1920sóat his peak he was a director of seventeen corporationsóhe also had a home in Santa Barbara, California; an opulent residence at 1 Sutton Place in Manhattan; a country mansion on Long Island; and ìDuncannon,î a ten-thousand-acre South Carolina lodge and preserve where the younger Bushes would hunt doves and quail and shoot skeet.15 Some winters saw him take a house in Aiken, South Carolina, just a few miles from the polo field where Averell Harrimanóa dedicated, eight-goal playeróran his string of ponies. (For a short time, Walker and Harriman had a stable together on Long Island, racing horses under their own colors.) Like Harriman, Walker sometimes took his extended family south in a private railroad car. One Bush granddaughter described the happy times at Duncannon, remembering ìthe wonderful food and the care taken over the slightest things, like the trimmed edges of the grapefruit. We were waited on by the most wonderful black servants who would come into the bedrooms early in the morning and light those crackling pine-wood fires.î16 Walker was flintyóan amateur heavyweight boxing champion in his youthóand something of a pirate in business. He was a lover of golf and Scotch whisky, a notable ladiesí manóhe courted and married Lucretia Wear, a famous beauty of the 1890s who had already attracted the St. Louisñ bred fashion writer CondÈ Nastóand a bear to members of his own family. Years later, granddaughter Elsie Walker called him ìa tough father, a tough old bastard....There really wasnít a lot of love on the part of the boys [her father and uncles] for their father.î17 When his daughter Dorothyólike her father a hard-charging athleteómet Prescott Bush in St. Louis in 1919, Walker quickly warmed to him as a fellow golfer and sportsman who was also handsome, smooth, and polished in an Ivy League way, something Walker was not. Dorothy and Prescott married in 1921, and after Prescott Bush had several yearsí experience elsewhere, he came to work for his father-in-law at W. A. Harriman and Company as a vice president in 1926. With the added assistance of his own Yale and Harriman connections, he became Walkerís heir apparent, emerging as one of the managing partners in the merged firm of Brown Brothers Harriman by the mid-thirties. If George H. Walker was something of a second father to Prescott Bush, the same and perhaps more can be said of the relationship of his son George Herbert (ìUncle Herbieî) Walker Jr. to Prescottís son George H. W. Bush. While the successful public careers came on the Bush side of the family, the financial assistance and business mentoring was disproportionately on the Walker side. Many years later, when his uncle was dying, George H. W. sent an emotional letter telling him how much he had needed him ìas my father, my brother and my best friend.î18 Having to acknowledge and accept the influence and money of two Walker generations cannot always have been easy for Samuel Bush and then for Prescott Bush. In Greenwich, even after Prescott and Dorothy Bush had been married for almost two decades, the title to the big house on Grove Lane was in the name of Dorothy Walker Bush. Only in 1981, when George H. W. Bush became vice president, did the Walkers, prompted by the security-minded invasiveness of the Secret Service, suggest that he purchase and move into the big family house on Walkerís Point in Kennebunkport. One can easily imagine this longtime economic subordination spurring a compensating Bush drive for office and political power. At the same time, however, the Bushes rode steadily higher as the main historical currents of 1917ñ60 created a new U.S. global hegemony and a domestic militaryñnational security complex. These developments meshed with the almost simultaneous maturation of an American establishment drawn in part from the management of two world wars but also reflecting the interwar golden era of the preparatory school, Harvard-Yale-Princeton, investment banking, diplomatic service, and Wall Street legal axis that columnist Joseph Alsop rightly called the ìWASP Ascendancy.î19 The Twentieth-Century Heyday of the Old-Boy Network Whether such claims for the rise of an American aristocracy are exaggerated or not, the early and midñ twentieth century did see a partial American equivalentóin some ways, a transatlantic imitationóof the prior British Ascendancy, rooted in Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge, the Guards, the Foreign Office, and the like. Over the years, dozens of its participants have nostalgically described everything from the cutlery at Harvardís Porcellian Club to the portions of the Connecticut Gold Coast deemed most acceptable in polite society. During the fifties and sixties, the name Bush did not show up in these various memoirs, recollections, and chronicles of white-shoe America. Only in the seventies did it begin to creep into sentences and footnotes, but by the eighties it commanded paragraphs and pages, and now the white- shoe racks in the Bush closet have become a literary staple. George H. W. Bushís first biographer, Nicholas King, a Harvard man who worked for Charles Bohlen at the U.S. embassy in France and then for Bush himself at the United Nations, may have reflected the familyís own 1980 perceptions of their networkís heyday when he started: ìAt the close of the 1930s and on the eve of the Second World War, these [prep] schools were at their apogee. They set the academic standards and their graduates dominated the major Eastern colleges, especially the Ivy League. They also brought the famous ëold boy networksí to the peak of their power. To be a graduate of Andover is no doubt still of some importance to the world, but then it had special significance.î20 Within the upper tier of prep schools and colleges, clubs and secret societies were considered the innermost sanctum. Andoverís AUV (Auctoritas, Unitas, VeritasóAuthority, Unity, Truth), to which George H. W. Bush belonged, was the acme at that school until the secret societies were abolished after World War II. Its code of secrecy was a teenagerís preparation for what might follow in college. At Harvard, so important was Porcellian that rejection by it provided Franklin D. Rooseveltís unhappiest recollection. Theodore Roosevelt was so proud of being in the ìPorcî that he boasted of it to Germanyís Kaiser Wilhelm. In this same decade, Grotonian Averell Harriman helped lead a move to Yale as a protest against Groton-Porcellian clique-ism at Harvard. At Yale, ìthe most legendary of all college clubs was Skull and Bones. To be tapped by Bones in that era was akin to canonization....The clocks [at Bones] were set five minutes fast to symbolize that Bonesmen started life a leg up.î21 Columnist Joseph Alsop, himself a Porcellian man, still upheld the ascendancy of that eraís WASP schools in a late-1980s retrospect: ìI donít know quite how to define it without sounding a fool except to say that it really was an ascendancyóin fact, an inner group that was recognizable as a group.î22 John McCloy, chairman of the Chase Bank and prominent enough in the 1950s to be thought of as the establishmentís unofficial chairman, protested that he really wasnít, because of his middle-class origins. ìYes, of course,î he acknowledged, there was an establishment. ìThey were Skull and Bones, Groton, that sort of thing. That was the elite....I always had it in mind, even to this day, that I was not really a part of that.î23 That three generations of Bushes have been ìpart of thatî is central to the familyís ascent. Friend and foe alike have tied success at the networkís schools to three essential underpinnings: good family, good attitude (loyalty to the school and to oneís peers), and good skill at sports. Rough edges made for a poor fit. Prescott Bush (St. Georgeís 1913, Yale 1917, Skull and Bones) and George H. W. Bush (Andover 1942, Yale 1948, Skull and Bones) fit well, thereby unfolding a kind of red carpet on which they could later walk comfortably through the upper echelons of American life. Prescott Bushís skill in athleticsóhe excelled in tennis, was captain of the baseball team, and played a championship-level golf gameómade him stand out in his class, impressed his future father-in-law, and aided his subsequent career. Imposing at six feet four inches, polished and courtly, he was a man who conveyed integrity and did well with clients and customersómore a meeter-and-greeter than the clever sort who pioneered innovative transactions or stratagems. ìMovie-star handsome, tall and athletic,î in the words of his biographer, ìhe was a rain-maker, earning his money primarily by charming and snaring potential clients.î24 As managing partner of Brown Brothers Harriman, he sat on an impressive array of corporate boardsóPrudential Insurance, Pan American Airlines, CBS, the Simmons Company, Dresser Industries, Pennsylvania Water and Power, and the Vanadium Corporation of Americaówhere his business, social, and government connections were valued.25 Besides golf, though, what Prescott Bush seemed to like most of all was singing. Alsop recalled many hours of choruses and bothy ballads at Harvardís Porcellian, but it was at Yale that song was particularly emphasized as a facet of male bondingówitness the prominence of the Whiffenpoofs and a host of lesser imitators with names like the Grill Room Grizzlies. Throughout Bushís busy investment career, he sang in different clubs and quartets, often traveling to do so. According to one former Yale Glee Club president, ìIt was his ear, his enthusiasm and his concept of a second bass part in a quartet which revolutionized barbershop singing.î26 Besides singing with the Whiffenpoofs, he brought them along on the Senate campaign trail. Even for many Connecticut voters it was a bit too much Old Blue. Fitzhugh Green, another George Bush biographer, characterized the elder Bush as a man who ìbelieved in principles, but left no substantive footprints. He offered no particular vision, except that of a life of rectitude and of musicóalways music, shared with the young.î27 As a senator, Bush enjoyed his ten years on the Hill but made little legislative mark, a charge akin to the one later directed at his son. Still, fellow legislators respected the influence he had both in Wall Street circles and as one of President Eisenhowerís favorite golfing partners. It also helped, as one colleague observed, that he looked like ìa Roman senator.î The career benefits of Groton, AUV at Andover, and Skull and Bones were enormous, as the Bushes would discover in everything from bull and bear to cloak-and-dagger. Yet in some ways, the products of such schools were unsuited for the battlefields of elective politics. Cyril Connolly, an English Old Etonian, observed that these institutions tended to instill a state of permanent adolescence in their alumni, arresting aspects of personal development and extending a taste for wine, song, pranks, initiations, oaths of secrecy, inner sanctums, and other rites of loyalty far into middle age.28 As a twenty-three-year-old new army captain in 1918, Prescott Bush foolishly sent a joke letter to his hometown newspaper, the Columbus State-Journal , announcing that he had been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Victoria Cross, and the Legion of Honor on World War Iís western front for saving the lives of Generals Pershing, Foch, and Haig by bringing down an almost fatal artillery shell with his bolo knife.29 His parents had a little explaining to do. Earlier that year, together with four other officers-cum-Bonesmen, he was said to have plundered Geronimoís grave near Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to take the Apache chiefís skull back to the Skull and Bones Vault at Yale. Even at age fifty-seven in 1952, introducing presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower at Yale, he wore a collegianís raccoon coat, acting like a cheerleader until students started calling ìDown, Bush.î30 George H. W. Bush had his own distinctive preppy streak. In addition to his famous narration while playing horseshoesóa triumphant ìMr. Smooth does it againî with each ringeróhis recurrent bursts of enthusiastic schoolboy phraseology even as president were sometimes described as ìBush-speak.î His enthusiasm extended to schoolboy games. The U.S. ambassador to Kenya, Robinson McIlvaine, after a 1971 visit by the Bushes to Nairobi, recalled how Bush would sit down with McIlvaineís niece and her youthful friends to play ìthumper,î a game like slapjack in which players had to bang on the carpet when a particular card turned up. The slow thumper lost the hand. Bush, captivated, would ask in subsequent Christmas cards who had been the best thumper recently. One year, said McIlvaine, he enclosed a picture of Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on the Soviet desk in the UN General Assembly with a note: ìYou see, we play Thumper at the United Nations, too.î31 A study of the first Bush administration by two Time reporters revealed further evidence of that adolescent streak. ìHe cued up exploding golf balls made of chalk for unsuspecting visitors at Kennebunkport. On Halloween 1988 he donned a rubber George Bush mask and walked through his campaign plane exhorting passengers to ëRead my lips! Read my lips!íî He was also a man who ìhowled with laughter when he played the twenty-dollar-bill-on-the-end-of-a-string trick on unsuspecting waiters at the Chinese embassy; who would greet visitors to the Oval Office by placing a wind-up mechanical bumblebee on the floor and letting it buzz around; who walked around the White House with a voice- activated stuffed monkey that socked itself on the head whenever the commander in chief began to talk.î32 George W. Bush, in turn, is sometimes portrayed as having developed such tendencies in a fraternity- boy vacuum, without noting this larger family heritageófor example, his penchant during the 2000 campaign for doing imitations of Dr. Evil, the campy villain in the movie Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me . Journalist Frank Bruni, in his 2000 campaign book Ambling into History , referred to him as ìpart scamp and part bumbler, a timeless fraternity boy and heedless cutup,î and recalled one campaign episode in which Bush ìtook his [airplane hot towel], cleaned his hands with it, and then did something less expected: draped it over his entire face and then turned abruptly toward me. He was, at this point, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee...and he was playing a toddlerís game of peek-a- boo.î33 By then such antics were third-generation stuff. None of this clowning seems to have compromised family ambition. Prescott Bushís political career was both gentlemanly and, in its way, successful. His wife later said he had wanted to be president, believing that if he had started in politics at an earlier age, he might have been.34 More likely, such an effort would have failed because of his Wall Street background and certain World War II controversies, to which we will return. Perhaps his son knew, understood, and internalized what his father had privately desired. Certainly George H. W. Bushís political career and style resembled his fatherís. It is not clear that he cared much about politics before his father went to the Senate in 1952. But as Prescott Bushís second term passed the halfway mark in 1959ñ60, his son was beginning to prepare for a political career in Texas. He held off running for office until he had accumulated enough money to be independent and could bear the expense of public service while maintaining personal comfort. Like his father, he made his first political bid for a U.S. Senate seat, starting close to the top. This is the period that may have inculcated dynastic hopes. Like his father, Bush had been a notable athlete, both at Andover and at Yale. He captained baseball teams in both places and, in his own words, later half considered being ìa tennis bum.î35 He became a big man on campus at Andoveróone might think of the two columns of club memberships and extracurricular activities listed under his picture in the 1942 Phillips Andover yearbook as his first rÈsumÈóby epitomizing popularity, good attitude, and school spirit. He would do so again at Yale, albeit attending after World War II as a married man, which made him less of a joiner. Confronting burning issues or making ideological commitments was not part of his early political makeup. Bushís 1964 and 1966 election campaigns employed heavy advertising to downplay issues and elevate the candidateís personal appeal, casting him as a young family man on the go, hard at work in shirtsleeves and tie with a suit jacket carelessly thrown over his shoulder, Kennedy-style. Ironically, such image making provided a fair clue to what Bush would be in office: lithe, athletic, handsome, personable, and ambitiousóalways seeking friends and striding purposefully toward the approval of authority figures able to bestow his next nomination or appointive office.* In the more cynical seventies and eighties, assessments of the legislative and policy achievements in George H. W. Bushís rÈsumÈ generally concluded that it came up short. His preppy watchband would provide an opportunity for caricature assassination. His reputation for glad-handing and promoting, the political equivalent of school spirit, became a tired stereotype. Surveying Bushís 1971ñ72 service as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, even sympathetic biographer Green described him as ìso enthusiastic and thorough in his official entertaining that the mission protocol officer called him ëthe Perle Mesta of the U.N.í He didnít stop with the big ceremonial parties. He took a dozen or so members of the U.S. Economic and Social Council with him one night to sit in his Uncle Herbert Walkerís box at Shea Stadium to watch the Mets play baseball. He took others for Sunday meals at his parentsí house in Greenwich, Connecticut.î37 Wordy speeches in the UN General Assembly often found the U.S. ambassador at work penning his trademark short thank-you notes to fellow delegates and others. When he was chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1973ñ74, his behavior was much the same, as he covered the country ìlike a Republican brush salesman for a total of 124,000 miles, giving 118 speeches and 84 press conferences. Wherever he went he passionately insisted that no White House hand had been in the Watergate jam pot.î38 Like his father, he was more charmer than thinker. By now his image had begun to suffer. In 1972, New York magazine included Bush in its list of ìThe Most Over-Rated Men in New York.î In 1974, Bryce Harlow, an old Washington hand who was helping Gerald Ford to pick a vice president, felt obliged to point out George Bushís essential duality. On the one hand, the popular Bush had garnered the most support in an informal survey of Republicans in Congress, the GOP National Committee, the cabinet, and the White House staff. On the other hand, said Harlow, many of the nationís top leaders ìregarded him as intellectually ëlight.íî39 It was no longer enough, apparently, to be Poppy Bush, ìthe greatest kid in school,î navy combat pilot at twenty, son of a U.S. senator who had headed a major Wall Street investment bank. Vietnam and Watergate had changed the nationís political and cultural yardsticks. The up elevator of the old establishmentóof the World War II ìWise Menî and the newer ìBest and Brightestî of the Kennedy eraó had lost much of its power. Perhaps surprisingly, however, the change turned out not to matter. Bush served two additional short stints in high officesóas chief of the U.S. mission to the Chinese government in Beijing (1974ñ75) and then as director of the Central Intelligence Agency (1976). There, he helped to convince his old associates in Congress to stop investigating the CIA. Just as important, his appointment reassured senior CIA officialdom: No Bonesman from Yale, whose father had been an intimate associate of both Allen Dulles and Robert A. Lovett, would let them down. Yale history professor Gaddis Smith has observed that ìYale has influenced the CIA more than any other university, giving the CIA the atmosphere of a class reunion.î40 Bush kept the faith, although some faulted him for picking agreeable rather than talented top aides.41 By 1978, he had decided to run for president. Biographers have acknowledged how some individuals and audiences he told of his plans in 1977ñ78 were taken aback: President of what? they asked. What corporation? No, the reply came: president of the United States. Bush clearly lacked the usual election victories and obvious geographic bases. His own base was more diffuse and establishmentarian: old friends and old fortunes. One of those friends admitted, ìWe had a terrible time keeping the UN ambassadors from forming a club for George Bush, or keeping the CIA from organizing support for him. That would not have been very helpful.î42 What he also had, besides his rÈsumÈ and social cachet, was the support of much of Gerald Fordís 1976 organization, including campaign manager James A. Baker III, Bushís old Houston chum. So, despite the skepticism at bourbon-and-sirloin venues like the Republican Menís Club of Texas, his candidacy was far from being merely fanciful. True, Ronald Reagan drubbed George H. W. Bush in the 1980 nomination race. The former California governor also developed enough distaste for his challenger to refuse at first to consider him for vice president. Yet Bush, who had won a pivotal early caucus in Iowa, also won Connecticut and Massachusetts in midseason. Thereafter, he managed to triumph in two later primaries in Pennsylvania and Michigan with the help of Ford-connected state party organizations. Reagan, after spending heavily in the early contests to overwhelm his multiple foesóBush, John Connally, John Anderson, Howard Baker, Bob Dole, and Philip Craneówas drained of cash by late April. A relative handful of primary and caucus victories and several hundred delegates were enough to make Bush the runner-up. Thereafter, the need to mend a breach with the GOPís old eastern establishment wing obliged a reluctant Reagan to turn to him as a running mate. For Bush the real prize, of course, lay in staking his claim to the political and governmental succession. Eisenhowerís vice president, Richard Nixon, had gone on to be the next Republican chief executive. Nixon, in turn, was succeeded by his last vice president, Gerald Ford. Never elected to any office higher than two terms in the House of Representatives from the Seventh District of Texas, George H. W. Bush was now in place to achieve the same ultimate promotion. If the old establishment of midcentury was fading, its credentials had lasted just long enough to bring one of its own to the brink of power. The American Politico-Economic Establishment and the Two World Wars The power structure that emerged in World War I and reached the height of prestige during the Second World War and the two following decades was obviously far more than just a social phenomenon. Groups like Skull and Bones were a clubby symptom but hardly a driving force. Part of the new establishment came from the organization and hierarchies of national mobilization that had been established during the two wartimesóyears that, quite simply, had realigned the world. These were the broad tracks along which the Walker and Bush families climbed, financially and politically. Over the years they led the family to an 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. From just 5 to 10 percent of U.S. gross domestic product in 1914, these sectorsí share in 1950 may have reached as high as 30 percent, bringing a parallel transformation of Americaís interest-group and power structures. Some scholars of the U.S. military-industrial complex date its origins back to the construction of a large steel-clad navy in the 1880s and 1890s, which made serious demands on government spending, heavy industry, and metallurgy. Most agree that the future complex took definable shape during the First World War, even though the disarmament treaties of the 1920s and neutrality sentiments of the 1930s kept military outlays too low to sustain preparedness until rearmament began in 1939ñ40.43 After Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, many who had cut their teeth during the 1917ñ18 mobilization were given much larger war-related responsibilities, cementing earlier elite credentials. Franklin D. Rooseveltís own role in 1917ñ18 as assistant secretary of the navy had included a lot of hard bargaining over war contracts. FDR had been caught up in, if not always impressed by, that mobilization. As president, if he didnít know those involved in the current effort from his years at Groton and Harvard, many were familiar from Woodrow Wilsonís wartime Washington. Both wartime mobilizations created lasting networks. Bernard Baruch, who had run the War Industries Board (WIB) in which Samuel Bush, Judge Robert S. Lovett, Clarence Dillon, and Robert Brookings had all worked, renewed his engagement in the early 1930s, helping to brainstorm the National Recovery Administration and drawing up FDRís Interwar Industrial Mobilization plan. He came out of retirement on a limited basis in 1943 to become chief policy consultant to the federal Office of War Management (OWM), and FDR at one point flirted with reinstalling him in the top job. Averell Harriman, finished with shipbuilding, kept his financial stakes in Brown Brothers Harriman and his other investments but jumped into the New Deal by working with two former WIB officials, Hugh Johnson and Herbert Bayard Swope, in the National Recovery Administration in New York and then Washington. He went on to become FDRís emissary to Churchill and Lend-Lease administrator, then ambassador to Russia, ambassador to Britain, and, after World War II, secretary of commerce and mutual security administrator. When World War II came, well-connected investment firms virtually doubled as Washington placement bureaus. Judge Lovettís son Robert A. Lovett, one of Prescott Bushís partners at Brown Brothers Harriman, became assistant secretary of war for air under Secretary Henry Stimson. Another Brown Brothers Harriman alumnus, Artemus Gates, took over as assistant secretary of the navy for air. From Dillon Read, the Wall Street firm that Clarence Dillon had turned into a powerhouse after his War Industries Board service, James Forrestal became undersecretary of the navy in charge of its economic activities and procurement. Others at Dillon Read who joined the mobilization included Paul Nitze (later national security adviser), William Draper (later chief of the economic section for the postwar U.S. military government of Germany), Ferdinand Eberstadt (later vice chairman of the War Production Board and a founding father of the CIA), and C. Douglas Dillon (Clarenceís son). Harriman was not the only high climber. Forrestal became secretary of the navy in 1944 and secretary of defense in 1947. Edward Stettinius Jr., whose father had been the Morgan partner in charge of the 1914ñ 17 purchase of U.S. arms and munitions for the French and British, had a series of key jobs: head of the War Resources Board in 1939, director of the Priorities Division of the Office of Production Management in 1941, undersecretary of state in 1943, and finally secretary of state in 1944. Lovett was named undersecretary of state, then undersecretary of defense, and finally became secretary of defense in 1951. So strongly had he come to epitomize establishment thinking that in 1961 John F. Kennedy, seeking exactly that gravitas after his hairbreadth victory, offered Lovett his choice of cabinet positionsóState, Defense, or Treasury. When Lovett declined for health reasons, Kennedy took as treasury secretary C. Douglas Dillon.44 Some chroniclers have profiled the 1917ñ60 emergence of ìthe Wise Menî and others in terms of links forged at universities and clubs, not least the Skull and Bones hegemony at Brown Brothers Harriman (Averell Harriman, E. Roland Harriman, Robert A. Lovett, Artemus Gates, Prescott Bush, and several others). However, the argument for an elite at least partly shaped by war priorities and mobilization service seems almost as compelling. In later years, Lovett reminisced about his fatherís ìManhattan and Locust Valley dinner parties attended by old friends from the War Industries Board, where he heard discussions about industrial mobilization and offered his own ideas on the importance of airplanes to the nationís transportation and defense.î45 Professor Robert Sobel, in The Life and Times of Dillon Read , noted that for Clarence Dillon, ìthe WIB experience was a watershed event...creating a community of interests and shared experiences second in Dillonís case only to that of Harvard.î46 Grosvenor Clarkson, secretary of the Council of National Defense, an early forerunner of the WIB, later recalled, with only some exaggeration, that ìthe War Industries Board of the United States had in the end a system of concentration of commerce, industry, and all the powers of government that was without compare among all the other nations, friend or enemy, involved in the World War.î47 In any event, the opportunities offered by Wall Street in the postñWorld War I era were little short of mind-boggling. Britainís Manchester Guardian had seen the change coming as early as 1917: ìThe war has radically transformed the relations between the United States and Europe....The United States by the end of this war will have wiped out most of its debt to foreign investors. It will have a currency of unimpeachable magnitude. The American bankers will have acquired the experience they have hitherto lacked in the international money market....It can hardly be doubted that under these circumstances, New York will enter the lists for the financial leadership of the world.î48 By 1919, the transfer of financial power was speeding up. Sterlingís postwar weakness had obliged the British Treasury to impose an informal embargo on British merchant banksí making foreign loans, which in effect moved a great deal of international business to New York. The world was about to become Americaís financial oyster. As U.S. bankers and businessmen cast their eyes overseas, shrewd law firms took on attorneys with war-era experience. Dean Acheson, who would climb the ladder from assistant secretary of state for European affairs in 1941 to secretary of state in 1949, wrote his own first book about the legal concepts developed by the War Labor Board.49 The name partners of the new Washington law firm he joined in 1922, Covington, Burling and Rublee, were respectively a well-connected Maryland congressman, the general counsel of the wartime Shipping Board, and an attorney who had worked with the Council of National Defense and with the French on the Allied Maritime Transport Council. On Wall Street, three of the law firms interacting with the future military-industrial and national security complexes were Cravath, Henderson and de Gersdorff; Sullivan and Cromwell; and Donovan, Leisure. Heading the latter was ìWild Billî Donovan, the World War I Congressional Medal of Honor winner who would go on to organize the World War II Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which served as the embryo of the CIA. The Cravath firm, meanwhile, drew its momentum from Paul Cravathís 1914ñ17 prominent drumbeating alongside the Morgan interests on behalf of the Allies, followed by his visibility in bankrolling the new Council on Foreign Relations in 1919. At Sullivan and Cromwell, the moving force was John Foster Dulles, soon to be joined by his younger brother Allen. Both were grandsons of Secretary of State John Foster and nephews of Woodrow Wilsonís wartime secretary of state, Robert Lansing. John Foster Dulles worked for the War Trade Board, thereafter attending the Versailles peace negotiations of 1919 as counsel to the U.S. Reparations Committee. A little later, Bernard Baruch, with whom Dulles had served on the Reparations Committee, arranged for the young lawyer to ghostwrite a book on the Versailles treaty. Brother Allen also went to Versailles, as a State Department representative assigned to the redrawing of central European boundaries.50 After the Republicans took the White House back in 1952, John Foster Dulles would become secretary of state, and Allen Dulles director of the CIA. During this period some of the most ambitious men on Wall Street spent months or years in Europe, drumming up bond issues (to sell in the cash-flush United States) and potential industrial participation or acquisitions for American companies. Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas described this up-Rhine and down-Danube commercial treasure hunt in The Wise Men , their study of Harriman, Lovett, Acheson, McCloy, et al.: ìWhile the rest of the country slept in deep isolation, a close-knit clique of Wall Street bankers and lawyers, most of whom had traveled through Europe as children, met in the clubs of London and Paris and Berlin as friendly competitors putting together suitable investments for their firms. In a private and profit-seeking capacity, they were rebuilding a war-ravaged Europe in a manner as grandiose as many of these men would employ a world war later with the Marshall Plan.î51 The House of Morgan had a strong residual advantage in Britain and a lesser one in France but indulged a wartime legacy of distaste for Germany. Thus it was to Germany, the postwar republic, that an important group of Wall Streeters turned their particular attentions. The most prominent were Averell Harriman, George H. Walker, Clarence Dillon, and the Dulles brothers. They often worked together in the 1920s, when ambitions were most grandiose, and in the 1930s, when embarrassing German relationships had to be sorted out, restructured, and even hidden. Many men with these particular involvements, or their family members, went on to become pillars of the U.S. national security and intelligence establishments during and after World War II. Almost from the start, American investments of the 1920s in both Germany and Russia were controversial. Harriman, Walker, Dillon, and the Dulleses were variously criticized for customer chasing, reckless lending (many of the German redevelopment bonds underwritten went bad in 1929ñ32), and even aiding previous or potential enemies. The investments were also on a large scale. Through one or another financial vehicle, the Harriman firms arranged a major shareholding in the Hamburg-Amerika line, set up a U.S. bank to serve the German Thyssen steel interests, bought a one-third interest in the principal German- owned coal and zinc mines in Poland (through a holding company called the Silesian-American Corporation), and took a position in Germanyís transatlantic cable company. In 1925, their friendly rival, Dillon Read, helped to refinance the Thyssen steel interests with a $15 million bond issue and then followed in 1926ñ27 with $70 million in bond issues for the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steelworks), a massive cartel of German coke, coal, iron, and steel producers.52 During World War II, it would produce some 40 percent of Germanyís steel plate, sheeting, pipes, and tubes. James Forrestal, who became Dillon Readís president in 1938, was for several years an officer of General Aniline, the cloaked U.S. subsidiary of I. G. Farben, the German chemical giant.53 Partner William Draper, who handled some of the German business, was also codirector of a Dillon subsidiary, the German Credit and Investor Corporation of New Jersey, which specialized in U.S. investments in Germany.54 By the late 1930s, Brown Brothers Harrimanóthe former W. A. Harriman and Companyóand Dillon Read were two notable active investors in a Germany rapidly rearming under Adolf Hitler. It is an irony, but not a coincidence, that by 1943, many of their best-known partners and executivesófrom Averell Harriman and James Forrestal to Robert Lovett, Douglas Dillon, William Draper, and David K. E. Bruceó were major figures in the Washington war effort or the Office of Strategic Services, as were the two Wall Street lawyers with the largest German practicesóthe two Dulleses. John Foster Dulles, as a board member of International Nickel, actually had helped work out that firmís prewar cartel agreement with I. G. Farben to provide Germany with a steady supply of nickel for armor plating. When Wall Street firms and major multinational corporations like General Motors, ITT, and Ford needed to rearrange German holdings, it was to these two that they turned. Prescott Bush, who handled much of the German work at Brown Brothers Harriman, used their services. In Allen Dullesís office notes of January 1937, the clients requiring cloaking of assets were short-handed as ìBrown Brothers HarrimanñSchroederñ Rock.î55 The U.S. Justice Department had begun probing German-connected companies and investors in 1941, but Pearl Harbor and the U.S. declaration of war against both Germany and Japan put government investigations into overdrive. In early March 1942, a special Senate committee began public hearings on cartel agreements between U.S. and German firms. Before long William S. Farish, the chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, had pleaded no contest to charges of criminal conspiracy between his company and I. G. Farben. In keeping with cartel agreements, Standard had withheld from U.S. authorities information on the production of artificial rubber. Secretary of War Stimson, a man with strong establishment tiesó Andover, Yale, Skull and Bones, and service in both Republican and Democratic cabinetsóasked President Roosevelt in March 1942 to stop the investigations because they would interfere with companies engaged in the war effort. However, that didnít stop the inquiries being made by the alien property custodian under the Trading with the Enemy Act of December 1941. None of this would have been happy news for Prescott Bush at 59 Wall Street. In 1938, the firm had been collaterally involved in a German transactionóshipping tetraethyl lead needed by the Luftwaffeóby the Ethyl Corporation, of which Farish was a director and which was half owned by Standard Oil of New Jersey.56 In 1941, the New York Herald Tribune had featured a front-page story headlined ìHitlerís Angel Has $3 Million in U.S. Bank,î reporting that steel baron Fritz Thyssen had channeled the money into the Union Banking Corporation, possibly to be held for ìNazi bigwigs.î57 UBC was the bank, nominally owned by a Dutch intermediary, that Brown Brothers Harriman ran for the German Thyssen steel family. Prescott Bush was a director. In August 1942, the property of the Hamburg-Amerika line, for many years partly owned by the Harriman and Walkerñcontrolled American Ship and Commerce Corporation, was seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act. On October 20, the alien property custodian seized the assets of the Union Banking Corporation. Eight days later, with UBCís books in hand, the government acted against two affiliates, the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation. In November, the government seized the assets of the last major entity connected to Harriman, Walker, and Bushóthe Silesian-American Corporation. Politically, the significance of these dealingsóthe great surpriseóis that none of it seemed to matter much over the next decade or so. A few questions would be raised, but Democrat Averell Harriman would not be stopped from becoming federal mutual security administrator in 1951 or winning election as governor of New York in 1954. No innuendo would keep John Foster Dulles from being appointed to a U.S. Senate seat in 1949 or becoming U.S. secretary of state in 1953. Nor would Republican Prescott Bush and his presidential descendants be hurt in any of their future elections. It is almost as if these various German embroilments, despite their potential for scandal, were regarded as unfortunate but in essence business as usual. Or more plausibly, that at a high governmental level, such roles were unofficially reclassified as an intelligence functionóa ìtell us what you know about Germanyî obligation. Those in the American legal and financial community who had decades of experience with Germany and well-placed connections there doubtless were considered to be important wartime national security assets, however questionable some of their overseas dealings. In any event, a surprising number of the descendants of men who had dealt with GermanyóWilliam S. Farish III, William Draper III, and Joseph Verner Reed Jr. (grandson of Remington Arms chairman Samuel Pryor, earlier a director of both UBC and American Ship and Commerce)óturned up as close personal advisers or high-level appointees in the George H. W. Bush administration. Chapter 6 will look at these connections in more detail. For now, suffice it to say that besides its dynastic roots in the early years of the military-industrial complex, the Bush family and circle were quietly important in the midcentury emergence of the U.S. intelligence community. These connections go back more than three decades before George H. W. Bushís thirteen brief months as director of the Central Intelligence Agency from December 1975 to January 1977. National security as well as political connections would be vital to the familyís success and standing over the quarter century following the end of World War II. Paternal Footsteps Followed and Rejected:The Four-Generation Making of the Bush Dynasty Dynastic persistence usually depends more on heredity than on bonds of affection. Among Englandís eighteenth-century Hanoverian kings, for example, eldest sons generally disliked their fathers. George II and George IV set up rival courts as Prince of Wales or prince regent before their fathers died. Three centuries earlier, English and French kings and Turkish sultans executed siblings, nephews, and cousins with hardly a thought. By contrast, the dynastic houses of the United States, particularly the Kennedys and Bushes, have presented themselves with thoroughly warm, benign imagery: handsome and large extended families interrupting happy barbecues and brisk touch-football games to campaign for one another, burbling with a civic enthusiasm that might have been scripted by the Hollywood of the 1950s or drawn by Norman Rockwell as a Saturday Evening Post cover. Little press attention, however, is ever paid to the familiesí dark sides: the hereditary dysfunctions, crowds of old retainers, allied families and networks, supplicants for a second or third generation of favors, and the kind of persisting domestic or international vendettas that color the histories of the royal houses of Europe. Any serious look at the Bush succession must be through these lenses. After four generations of wealth, the family has lost whatever nodding acquaintance its ancestors born in the 1860s might have had with Horatio Alger. By the mid-twentieth century, connections and crony capitalism had become the family economic staple, with emphasis on the rewards of finance, and instinctive policymaking fealty to the investment business. The Bushes have produced no college presidents or stonemasons, no scientists or plumbing contractorsógenerally speaking, their progeny have become almost exclusively financial entrepreneurs. These recurrent economic biases are part of the subject matter of chapter 4. This chapterís focus, keyed to dynastic success itself, is on how four generations have sought to elevate the family, and the degree to which the heir in each generationóPrescott Bush Sr., George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bushóhas imitated (or not imitated) the career path of his father. The putative answers begin to fill in some interpretive gaps. Fathers and sons have not always been as supportive as appearances suggested. George Herbert Walker and Samuel Bush made their successes by leaving their fathersí vocationsó respectively, dry goods and the Episcopal ministryóand striking out on their own. Neither was a particular role model for his own sons; both provoked some degree of filial resentment or distance. Prescott Bush talked about his father not having money for him, and did not go back to Columbus, Ohio, to work (save for a brief period after his mother died in an auto accident). He may have found more of an economic, political, and athletic authority figure in father-in-law George Herbert Walker. On the other hand, Prescott Bush may well have resented, by 1942, the nest of cobra eggs that his father-in-law had left under the names Union Banking Corporation, American Ship and Commerce, Silesian-American, and the rest. Former Justice Department official John Loftus suggests such disillusionment in his book The Secret War Against the Jews . Other chroniclers have avoided the subject. What George H. W. Bush, in turn, was trying to do when he went from Andover into naval aviation training rather than Yaleóand then when he went with Dresser Industries, an oil services company, rather than staying in New York with Brown Brothers Harrimanóis also grist for interpretation. Was he rejecting that world or just trying to get out of his fatherís long eastern and Ivy League shadow? Loftus, citing unnamed sources in the intelligence community, contends that the eighteen-year-old George H. W. Bush, in becoming a naval aviator, was trying to redeem the family honor from the German taint.58 The greater weight of evidence, judged by the views of biographers, is that he had a great respect for his father, proudly following his path through Yale and Skull and Bones. Besides, at age eighteen, just out of Andover and with no college under his belt, he depended on his fatherís help to arrange an underage and unqualified entrance to the naval air program. While in theory this entrance would have appeared impossible, it might have been quite manageable with a telephone call from Prescott Bush to one of three fellow Yale and Skull and Bones men (the secretary of war, the assistant secretary of war for air, or the assistant secretary of the navy for air). Indeed, when the new Yale graduate went to Dresser in 1948 instead of into investment banking, supposedly wanting no part of ìgetting a job with Dadís help and through Dadís friends,î being hired was once again a mere paternal word awayóa conversation between Prescott Bush, then a Dresser board member for eighteen years, and Dresser chairman Neil Mallon, yet another Bones comrade, whose own posting had originated two decades earlier on the whim of the management group at W. A. Harriman and Company. The managers had just bought and refinanced Dresser, and were looking for someone to run it. In neither case was the Bush apple falling too far from the tree. The official history of Dresser Industries (1979) does not in fact sustain the legend that Bush struck out boldly for the wilds of Texas: ì[Prescott] Bushís own regard for Dresser had been passed to his son, George, who, following World War II, had worked for [company treasurer Rudolph] Reimer in the Cleveland headquarters, then for Pacific Pumps and Ideco [two subsidiaries] before becoming an independent oil producer in Texas.î59 The upscale side of Midland, where Bush wound up living, quickly became a kind of Cambridge or New Haven South. Half of his friends in the oil business were transplanted Ivy Leaguers. The townís newly paved streets were named after Ivy League colleges: Millionaires lived along Princeton and Harvard Streets (as George W. later would). Small Midland, by itself, supported Harvard, Yale, and Princeton Clubs. Interestingly, although Bushís independent oil ventures in Texas were family funded, only a relatively small stake ($50,000) came from his father. The larger flow, another $350,000 in 1950 and $500,000 in 1953, came from the friends and clients of George Herbert Walker Jr.óUncle Herbieówhose own children resented how much attention he (like his own father) seemed to concentrate on the Bushes. Where George H. W. Bush indisputably took after his own father, not after his Walker relations, was in preferring public office and in heading off toward politics once he had enough money to be independent. He also continued his fatherís national security interests in taking up the CIA directorship in 1975, as well as by (usually) being a New Englandñtype Republican fiscal conservative and social moderate disinclined to wear ideological cowboy boots. His initial presidential nomination bid in 1980, instead of counting on the oil states or the South, looked hopefully toward early-voting Iowa and beyond to northeastern states. Despite a much-advertised taste for pork rinds and country music, George H. W. Bush wound up even more of a Yale caricature than his father had been in 1952, in his raccoon coat cheerleading for Eisenhower. In 1988, after George H. W. lost the Republican caucuses in Iowa, he made the extraordinary excuse that his supporters were busy on the golf course or at air shows or debutante parties. That same year, Washingtonís Gridiron Club spoofed him with not inappropriate lyrics: ìIf your daughterís in cotillion and your sonís enrolled at Choate and your wife is worth a million, Iím sure to get your vote.î60 Son George W. Bush, despite making the Connecticut-to-Texas transformation with sagebrush panache, took his father as a role model. In 2000, Elizabeth Mitchell, executive editor at George, the magazine begun by John F. Kennedy Jr., published a book called W: Revenge of the Bush Dynasty . Her principal thread was a pursuit not only of how much he resembled his father but of how he had consciously sought to imitate him and follow in his career footsteps: ìSome of the twinning of mannerisms could be downright spooky to friends. Of course, they shared the same first and last names. Always people would be doing somersaults to distinguish between them. George and Georgie. George Senior and Junior. Big George and Little George. George and George W.î61 Besides their physical resemblance, George W. shared his fatherís tendency to play golf for speed and to mix up his sentences with something resembling verbal dyslexia. Actual dyslexia ran in their family; in 2000, writer Gail Sheehy marshaled a case that George W., like his brother Neil, had it.62 However, the Sheehy hypothesis was never really pursued. Father and son also had a striking ability to remember peopleís names and faces and to memorize things, especially baseball batting orders, starting lineups, and fraternity members. For bothóand apparently for Prescott Bush and Great-grandfather Bush, tooóunusual memory was a great asset, both in retail politicking and in retaining data and information. Like his father, George W. Bush went to Andover, and like his father and grandfather, he attended Yale. Like his grandfather, who played first base, and his father, who did likewise, George W. also made Yaleís varsity baseball team, albeit only as a third-string pitcher. Also like his father, he became president of Yaleís Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. Chronicler Mitchell noted that his engagement to a Houston girl named Cathy Wolfman ìso echoed George W.ís parentsí history that even some of his friends noticed. Cathy had been a Smith girl, as Barbara was, although she transferred to Rice University for her last years. George W. was 20 years old, the same age his father had been when he married....They made the decision over Christmas vacation, the same holiday season when his parents wed. They planned to spend senior year in New Haven together just like his parents had.î63 However, the engagement was later ended. At Yale, both his grandfather and father were tapped by Skull and Bones, and so was George W. After graduating, he became a military pilot like his father, with some similar help from family influence. In early 1968, before his graduation, a friend of his fatherís spoke to Texas lieutenant governor Ben Barnes. The lieutenant governor, in turn, contacted the commander of the Texas Air National Guard, Brigadier General James M. Rose, with the result that George W. jumped the several waiting lists involved. After taking five weeks of basic training, he was discharged as an enlisted man, recommended for a second lieutenancy the next day, and given pretraining permission to spend September to November working in the campaign of successful GOP Florida Senate candidate Edward J. Gurney. It had been against navy regulations in 1942 to place eighteen-year-old George Bush in flight training, and the Los Angeles Times found a similar bending of the rules twenty-six years later. George W. did not qualify for either a direct commission or flight training.64 Tom Hail, the historian of the Texas National Guard, explained that direct commissions were ìfor doctors only, mostly because we needed extra flight surgeons.î65 The air force flight-instruction program was also a favor, because such expensive training would not normally be given to a green candidate who had shown no professional commitment. The Texas Air National Guard arranged for George W. to train on F-102 fighters, dated aircraft being phased out of frontline service. He knew that he would not go to Vietnam; indeed, his own unit in Texas was being shut down even as he finished flight training. George W. thereupon went to work in his fatherís unsuccessful 1970 Senate campaign, after which he found a job traveling for Stratford of Texas, an agribusiness firm run by fellow Yale Skull and Bonesman Richard Gow, who had been with his father at Zapata Petroleum. In 1972, he attached himself to another family friend, former Republican deputy national chairman James Allison Jr., in another losing effortóthe Alabama U.S. Senate campaign of former postmaster general Winton M. Blount. Twenty-six years old in mid-1972, George W. was stumbling, falling far behind in his effort to walk in his fatherís footsteps. At some point late in 1972, his father got him a different kind of job, working with minority children in the Professionals United for Leadership League (PULL), an organization that the elder Bush chaired. George W. seems to have stayed in this job through the summer of 1973 until he went off to Harvard Business School. Few explanations have been offered for this unusual employment, but J. H. Hatfield, in a hostile 2000 biography entitled Fortunate Son, made a charge never substantiated (or, for that matter, comprehensively refuted): that after a 1972 arrest in Texas for possession of cocaine, George W. worked at PULL for some months as part of a deal by which his record was later expunged by the court.66 A degree from Harvard Business School put Bush back on a meaningful career trajectory, and shortly after graduating in 1975, he got back on his fatherís old track by deciding to seek his fortune in familiar Midland. A few years later, the 1980 census would peg Midland as the richest town in America, with the highest per capita income and the highest level of Rolls- Royce sales.67 Like his father teaming with John Overbey in 1950, George W. decided to begin on his own by being a landmanóthe person who prowls the maps and records at the county courthouse for potentially oil-productive land rights and then locates the owner to strike a deal. In 1977, he named his mini-enterprise ArbustoóSpanish for Bushóbut he got married that year and wound up doing no drilling until 1979. Once again, he was thrown off his fatherís vocational timing in 1978 by a local opening for the U.S. House of Representatives. Instead of waiting to make enough money to become financially independent before going into politics, he launched a campaign for the West Texas seat being vacated by longtime conservative Democrat George Mahon. He won the nomination, defeating a Reagan supporter, Odessa mayor Jim Reese, who then declined to back him in the general election. Bush lost in November to conservative Democrat Kent Hance but took a respectable 47 percent to Hanceís 53 percent. Battle lines for the 1980 Republican presidential race were already being drawn, and some pro-Reagan Republicans tried to tie George W. to his fatherís internationalist and eastern establishment connections. Like his father in the Senate races of 1964 and to a lesser extent 1970, George W. was dismissed as too preppy, too Yalie, to be truly Texan. In 1979, his uncle Jonathan, who headed a small New York investment firm named J. Bush and Company, put together a drilling fund for his nephew at the same time as he was raising money for the accelerating presidential bid of George W.ís father. Arbusto, now headquartered in the same Midland Petroleum Building where George H. W. Bush had started Zapata a generation earlier, got a pot of $565,000 from Uncle Jonathanís investors. However, the wildcatting didnít go well, and oil prices, after peaking in 1980, dropped in 1981 and 1982. As his fatherís prominence had increased, George W. renamed the company Bush Exploration. He went back to family friends for more moneyóoil investments, even ones with empty holes, were useful as tax sheltersóand came up with $4.7 million, including $1 million from Philip Uzielli, an investor with several Bush connections, and $172,550 from William H. Draper III, a fellow Bonesman. Arbusto, the joke went, had turned into Ar-Bust-o. Its investors took big nominal losses (in the $3 million range) even while Bush got a salary and office operations money. In 1984, a Cincinnati-based group, including a Yale classmate, decided to buy out Arbusto and hire George W. to run the groupís oil interests in Midland. The vice presidentís sonóhis father was now laboring in Washington for energy deregulationóbecame chairman and third-largest owner of the company, Spectrum 7 Energy Corporation, with 16 percent of the stock.68 By 1986, oil prices had plummeted; the oil business was a disaster, and so were the finances of Spectrum 7. A major outlay for stripper wells had failed, and Bush started looking for another financial angel. As the Observer of London would later note, ìWhenever heís struck a dry well, someone has always been willing to fill it with money for him.î69 This time it was Harken Energy, a small Texas firm with high-powered connections that was then gobbling up other small oil companies on the verge of bankruptcy. Harken offered a swap: one of its shares for every five of Spectrum 7. None of the Cincinnati investors seemed to mind, so the deal closed on September 30, 1986. George W. got stock worth about $530,000, a Harken directorship, and a two-year consulting arrangement at $80,000 per year, which later rose to $120,000 a year. Bush senior now being within hailing distance of the White House, the would-be influence buyers grew more substantial: Over the next few years, Harken would turn out to have links to Saudi money, CIA-connected Filipinos, the Harvard Endowment, the emir of Bahrain, and the shadowy Bank of Credit and Commerce International. The Harken deal also gave George W. something else: freedom to do what he wanted beyond attending the occasional Harken board meeting. His choice was to help in the campaign his father, about to finish a second term as Reaganís vice president, was beginning for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination. By this point, George W. Bush had spent almost two decades as an adult trying to follow in his fatherís footsteps and generally lacking the necessary luck or skills to do so. But between 1986, when his father began running for the presidency, and 1992, when he was driven from it, the political dynamic changed. So did George W. Bush. The connection to the old establishment, whose red carpet his father had walked so successfully through potentially hostile Nixon and Reagan administrations, had by now become a liability. The mocking Gridiron stanzas would be paralleled in newsmagazine covers about the ìwimp factor,î and in scathing 1991 public resentment of George H. W. Bushís inability to relate to grocery prices or scanners. Such themes would recur during the 1992 New Hampshire GOP presidential primary in taunts hurled by challenger Patrick Buchanan at ìKing Georgeî and the ìWalkerís Pointî elites. The vote share that Bush received that November was the worst for a sitting president in eight decades. But only a little more than a year after the dust of 1992 had settled, George W. Bush was running for governor of Texas in the 1994 election. Moreover, he was now displaying a cultural and political persona quite unlike his fatherís, one that promised a real chance to restore both his family and the Republican Party to power in 2000. Bush still relied on the four mainstays of his fatherís establishment: finance, oil and energy, the military-industrial complex, and the national securityñintelligence community. These power bases were quite compatible with the increasingly southern base and the conservative ideological evolution of the Republican Party. What was different was Bushís nonelite demeanor: the cow country accent, the rumpled clothing, the chewing tobacco, the style of religiosity, the moral fundamentalism, the outsider language, the disdain for the Harvards and Yales, the six-gun geopolitics, and not least the garb of a sinner rescued from drink and brought to God by none other than evangelist Billy Graham. To understand this transformation, consider the tale of George W. Bush not following in his fatherís footsteps. From a fairly early age, he was more of a rascal and less of an Ivy League gentleman in training, a Texas cutup with a Texas drawl. At Andover, he could manage to become a Big Man on Campus type only by rowdy witóhis nickname was ìthe Lipîóand by postures like making himself ìStickball Commissioner.î One of the few unassigned books he read was Barry Goldwaterís Conscience of a Conservative . As president of the DKE house at Yale, he got in trouble for lifting a Christmas wreath from a store and for branding pledges as an initiation. In contrast to his fatherís fond Ivy memories, he came away from Yale with a grudge against its fashionable campus liberalism. At Harvard Business School, one girlfriend recalled, he didnít fit the Charles River MBA norm: ìWhile they were drinking Chivas Regal, he was drinking Wild Turkey. They were smoking Benson and Hedges, and heís dipping Copenhagen, and while they were going to the opera, he would listen to Johnny Rodriguez over and over and over and over.î70 Friends recalled several years of bombast and wastrelism after he returned to Texas in 1975. Before he got married in 1977, a worst-dressed award was named after him at the local country club. He had been an Episcopalian as a youth, but he joined Midlandís First Methodist Church after being wed there. The worse things got in the oil business and with his bourbon habit, the more attention he paid to Bible study classes. ìI believe my spiritual awakening started well before the price of oil went below $9 [per barrel],î he told one interviewer, but 1986 was ìa year of change when I look back at it.î71 That was when he found God and, right after his fortieth birthday, put away the Wild Turkey bottle. An ivied Episcopal faith had not helped George H. W. Bush get along with the Southern Baptist rural Democrats of Texas any more than it had endeared him to the fundamentalists, evangelicals, Pentecostals, and premillennialists who filled the battalions of the Religious Right critical to the Reagan-era national GOP. By contrast, a decade after being saved by Billy Graham, an evangelized and fundamentalist-leaning George W. would reply ìJesus Christî when asked what philosopher had most influenced him. Bible Belt televangelists, some of them his fatherís persecutors, became his proud hosts from Longview to Lubbock. In New Hampshire and other Yankee states in 1988, the younger Bush frequently made a bad impression with his Texas twang, cowboy boots, and wad of chewing tobacco dribbling a small brown stream out of the side of his mouth. He was, in short, almost a caricature overcorrection of several of his fatherís greatest political weaknesses. However, party power brokers assumed the roughness could be polished. By 1997, a considerable number of the big donors, business and financial magnates, powerful lobbyists, and Republican hierarchs who had supported his father were concluding that with a George W. Bush matured by six years as governor of Texas, they could preempt the Republican nomination in 2000. Then, by tapping the publicís moral hunger and Clinton fatigue, they could win the presidential election and govern the United States further to the right than George H. W. Bush would have imagined. Finance, oil, the military-industrial complex, and the national securityñintelligence community would return to the nationís highest councils. Fulfillment of this strategy would mark one of the most extraordinary role changes by a major American political family in the countryís history. George H. W. Bush had lost the presidency in 1992 partly because he struck voters as an upper-class man with little sense of the rest of the country, never a winning position in U.S. politics. Voters have generally responded best to more interesting or complicated politiciansówitness the dualities posited by mid-twentieth-century historian Richard Hofstadter in many of the most influential: Thomas Jefferson (ìthe aristocrat as a democratî), William Jennings Bryan (ìthe democrat as a revivalistî), Theodore Roosevelt (ìthe conservative as a progressiveî), and Franklin D. Roosevelt (ìthe patrician as an opportunistî).72 Itís not hard to define a similar duality for George W. Bush. Because of his family, his initial characterization must be conservative, aristocrat or patrician, although his demeanor from boyhood revealed practically nothing of the patrician. Let me propose three possible posttransformation nouns to accompany the first term: revivalist, evangelist, or fundamentalist. Taken together, his self-certainty, religious conviction touched with messianic hints, and a tendency to both doctrinal extremes and black-versus- white simplicities suggest a striking new pairing on the Hofstadter chart: the aristocrat as a fundamentalist. But we are getting ahead of our story. It is the presidential election year of 2000, and the modern United States is on the brink of an entirely unprecedented prospect: American political and economic dynastization. Excerpted from American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush by Kevin Phillips All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.