 Global Economy > World Debt Threat
Aristocracy, fortune and deceit
among the American Bushes
Special Feature:
A Connecticut Yankee hardballs the presidential family
Veteran author and journalist Kevin Phillips wrote American Dynasty because of a sense that something has gone wrong in American politics. He says that with the emergence of the Republican majority, especially in the past decade, there has been a loss in republican government and politics with a small “r.” The two Bush presidencies are bookends for this transformation. “The more I see a dynastic pattern and the inherent politics and loyalties of the Bush Administration, I see that’s a major problem,” he said at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at the end of February.
American Dynasty has attracted many readers—it was No. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list when he spoke—but Phillips is concerned about the broader public and the failure of the news media to grapple with the dynastic aspect of the 43rd and 41st presidents together. “The media cannot rise to a larger occasion,” he said, “or haven’t yet.”
American Dynasty examines the past four generations of the Bush family and explores four major themes that help explain the character of the 43rd and 41st presidencies. The first is the continuity in interest groups, major donors, key advisers, foreign embroilments and even family grudges over decades. “It’s an unusual pattern,” Phillips says, “if you take the two administrations together, not separately.”
A second theme is that the Bushes are the first presidential family to have come to power in part through the intelligence community, involving much more than Bush, Sr.’s post as director of the CIA before becoming vice president and president.
The third is that the Bushes are the first family to have had an overseas region—the Middle East—that is a focal point of their political, financial and corporate interest. “No other family has had this sort of connection with one part of the world.”
And the fourth, which came to Phillips after he was deep into his research, is the Bush connection to the Bin Laden family of Saudi Arabia. “You have a presidential family with connections to the family of the man and faction that 2.5 years ago that attacked the United States,” Phillips says. “It’s as if George Washington had a tie with George I. They were in the wig business together or something. Or Franklin D. Roosevelt had a thing on the side with Tojo—an oil business in Southeast Asia.”
Powerful father, chosen son
The two administrations should be viewed together, as a father and son combination, Phillips says. “They sound a lot alike. They look alike. They have almost the same name. George W., in his younger days, modeled himself on his father and tried to act and talk like him, and go to the same schools.”
In contrast, the Adams presidents were 24 years apart and in different parties, and the two Roosevelts were 24 years apart and in different parties. The Kennedys had only one president. “What we have here is entirely different,” Phillips says.
He says there are certain ways in which the second Bush presidency is a tactical reaction to some of the mistakes of the first. “Obviously they’re putting out a much more defined appeal to conservatives. They have the religious right locked up.”
But there are critical differences, if not so much socioeconomic than cultural and religious. “George W. Bush is 100 percent Texan. The old man had his preppie watch band on, and part of him was always from Greenwich, Connecticut, but George W. walks and talks like a Texan and does all that.”
More importantly, George W. is especially popular with the religious right. In 1986, he was his father’s liaison to the religious right, something that hasn’t become well known until recent biographies came out. George W. made the connections to the preachers and the televangelists.
“He was the guy who convinced his parents to tell Jim and Tammy Faye Baker that they actually watched his ‘Praise the Lord’ TV hour,” Phillips says. “Now, I can believe many things about Barbara Bush but not that she watched the ‘Praise the Lord’ TV hour.”
George W. was effective, and in the 1988 election his father did almost as well as Ronald Reagan. When when George W. ran in 2000, using religious demeanor, born-again symbols, prayer and so forth—whereas his father had gotten about 70 percent of the fundamentalist evangelical vote, George W. got about 84 percent. The religious right constituted 40 percent of his electorate.
Insiders with fingers abroad
Phillips observes that the uniqueness of the Bush presidents with respect to Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and US defense and intelligence have produced destabilization and a radicalized Islam. Over 40 years, the last two generations have built a web of relationships dating from the 1960s when George H.W. Bush and his Zapata oil company did business with the emir of Kuwait. “There’s a conflict of interest,” Phillips says. “It’s unclear where the policies and connections begin.”
Ties to the US weapons industries and intelligence go back even farther. Samuel Bush, George W.’s great-grandfather, was the president of Buckeye Steel, which was partly owned by Standard Oil. In 1917, he went to Washington to run the Small Arms, Ammunition, and Ordnance section of the War Industries Board. The other great-grandfather, George H. Walker, was a prominent St. Louis financier who got into war loans and war production. In 1919, he went into partnership with Averill Harriman on Wall Street, and they got involved in shipping, aviation, and a number of major projects to redevelop Germany and Russia after the World War I. Walker became a director of the American International Corporation, begun during World War I, which to some extent was a combination of a multinational corporation and a business intelligence operation.
When Walker was retiring, his son-in-law, Prescott Bush—George W.’s grandfather—took over his duties at the Harriman firm, including his ties to the intelligence community and defense establishment and some of the commercial interests with which Walker had been involved.
George Sr. got involved with the CIA long before he was appointed to run it by President Gerald Ford. Recruited at Yale, he became an asset of the CIA in the early 1960s, probably because his Zapata oil company, which was situated off Cuba, would have made his family of some use when Castro took over. “The odds are in favor of this,” Phillips says.
When Bush was in the CIA, his later years were marked by related activities and pitfalls—counterinsurgencies, illegal arms deals, secret military buildups, rogue banks like BCCI, scandals like Iran-Contra and other cover-ups.
“This is not the norm for a president,” he says. “It’s not what a typical president would get into. But if you have this backdrop of family ties and being able to feed off the intelligence community, it explains why George W. and his three brothers have gotten into so many business deals with Saudi and Kuwaiti investors, relationships with Miami fronts for the contras during the 1980s, and very close to Harken Energy when it bought out George W. Bush in the late 1980s.”
Phillips recalled the 1980 election year when the Iranian revolutionary government had seized 52 Americans as hostages. When President Jimmy Carter failed in April of 1980 to obtain their release, it became clear that the release or nonrelease of the hostages would be the pivot on which the 1980 election turned. The alleged October Surprise misbehavior by George Bush and others in the Republican campaign is that a group of top Republicans together with a rump faction of the CIA arranged for the Iranian revolutionary government to continue to keep the hostages under lock and key rather than release them in time for the election. The Republican deal—in which some point to Bush, Sr. as being involved—was also said to include money and secret arms and supplies for Iran.
From 1981 to 1990, Bush, Sr. was involved in the clandestine US war buildup of Saddam Hussein, the so-called Iraqgate scandal. From 1981 to 1988, the war between Iraq and Iran provided some justification for helping Iran in order to try to keep a balance, but when Bush, Sr. became president in 1989, he continued to keep building up Iraq, even after Iraq and Iran stopped fighting. By 1992, when the US-led Gulf War was over, these disclosures helped to push his job approval from a Gulf War high of 89 percent to 37 percent in late summer. Coincidentally, George W. had a peak approval rating in the early 1990s, right after 9/11, but his numbers, depending on which poll you use, are now down to 48 or 49 percent. “So he’s got some 40-point decline working now, too,” Phillips says.
He recalled that presidential candidate Ross Perot was especially accusatory of Bush, Sr. in the 1992 presidential debate: “If you create Saddam Hussein over a 10-year period using billions of dollars of US taxpayer money, step up to the plate and say it was a mistake.” Perot charged Bush with giving Saddam a “green light” to invade Kuwait. Still others charge Bush with fabricating intelligence data that showed Iraqi tanks massed to invade Saudi Arabia.
“There’s a big debate over whether they’re actually pictures or phony pictures, because it was alleged later that other surveillance photographs didn’t show them. So, what you’ve got here really is I suppose the beginnings of the suggestion of evidence that for the US to have in power a family that has these ties to the intelligence community, but also this sense of how you can manipulate them, when they have weak judgment to go with it, but this is not asset.”
Phillips doesn’t dwell on the current case that George W. lied about US intelligence data in the run-up to the Iraq War. “Dissembling about weaponry is a Bush family tradition that goes back two decades.”
The Bin Ladens
Phillips says he didn’t start American Dynasty with any real focus on the Middle East and the Bin Ladens of Saudi Arabia, but as he did more research and finished the last chapters, it began to take on more and more of significance. “Somehow in this 25 years of intelligence and conflict of interest in economics and embroilments, there’s a story that we haven’t had yet,” he says.
For example, in the 1990s, the Bushes and the Bin Laden family crossed paths when they were both financially involved in the famous Carlyle Group, which principally invested for a while in US defense and security firms. One of the Carlyle subsidiary companies helped train the Saudi special police which has put down the insurgencies against the royal family.
“So it may be that Osama bin Laden, the multimillionaire black sheep who became a terrorist in the 1990s, was partly radicalized by the Saudi-Wasington collusion,” Phillips says. “Certainly, a large number of people in Saudi Arabia are more radicalized.”
What the effect all these connections were on the origins, circumstances, or the investigations before and after 9/11 is unclear, but Phillips jabs at the major national media for not further pursuing Bush-bin Laden family ties. “There’s a lack of enterprise, and a lack of desire to rock boats,” he says. “The White House will retaliate against people on a day to day basis.”
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