The Bush dynasty's dark magic

One-time Republican hero Kevin Phillips dares to speak up against the Walker-Bush oligarchy that rules the American state through oil, intelligence, big money and the power of the Christian right.

By Joan Walsh

Jan. 27, 2004 | People like Kevin Phillips aren't supposed to exist anymore. In a country that's become "two nations," this time not black and white but Red and Blue, conservatives rarely engage with liberals (unless it's to lampoon or attack them), let alone read their publications, reckon with their arguments, or -- perish the thought! -- even agree with them. But here comes Phillips, the renowned Nixon White House strategist who wrote "The Emerging Republican Majority" in 1969, a Nixon/Reagan/John McCain kind of Republican, with the most damning book to date about the Bush administrations (yes, that's plural), "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush."

Sure, we've had great Bush-bashing tomes in the last year: Joe Conason's "Big Lies," Al Franken's "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them," David Corn's "The Lies of George W. Bush" (Phillips is old school; he prefers "deceit" to "lies"); "Bushwhacked" from Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose. Most have surged onto bestseller lists, thanks to the unquenchable Blue-state thirst for the truth about Bush misdeeds. Ron Suskind's "The Price of Loyalty: The Education of Paul O'Neill" is in a class by itself, the first tell-all from a member of the famously loyal and tight-lipped Bush administration. And while it bolsters the Bush critics' case against the president -- showing his indifference to policy, his slavish devotion to politics and his determination to do the bidding of the superrich -- its reach is by necessity narrowed, given the focus on the former secretary of the treasury.

Phillips, by contrast, has written a dark, sprawling, provocative, sometimes almost paranoid book -- which is not to say that its most troubling conjectures can't be true. He assembles a wide array of evidence to show how, over four generations, the Walker-Bush clan has been on the front line of the rise of the military-industrial-intelligence complex, the ever-growing national security state that its fourth-generation heir just happens to run today, like his father before him. Various Walkers and Bushes have popped up, like patrician Forrest Gumps, in hot spots all over the globe in the last century -- pre- and post-revolution Russia, pre- and post-Hitler Germany, in Cuba before and during the Castro regime, and of course everywhere in the Middle East. (The Bush family has been loosely involved with Iraq, Phillips shows, since George Walker joined Averell Harriman's efforts to rebuild the Baku oil fields in the Soviet Caucasus, a few hundred miles north of Iraq, against the wishes of the U.S. government.)

All these international men of finance, with heavy interests in the energy industry, occasionally clashed with American officials over the years -- by doing business with the early Soviet Union, or rearming Germany in the 1930s (some say into the '40s) or, if you include Dick Cheney in the family (and Phillips practically does, with good reason), lobbying against U.S. sanctions on Iraq from the corporate headquarters of Halliburton. But mostly they do their patriotic duty when asked to, duty that has sometimes included spying and other kinds of shadowy dealings with foreign nations. George H. Walker and his son-in-law Prescott Bush (great-grandfather and grandfather of the current president, respectively) can be tied to an amazing roster of Cold War national security potentates, including CIA director Allen Dulles and his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Defense Secretaries Robert Lovett and James Forrestal, and National Security Advisor Averell Harriman. Phillips calls Prescott Bush a "national security gray eminence," and speculates, on inconclusive evidence, that the Connecticut senator may well have been a CIA asset, "perhaps even a shadow CIA director"; his son George H.W. Bush, of course, wound up as CIA director under Nixon. If the connections sometimes seem sinister, they also make sense, given the way the free flow of capital and natural resources, especially oil, would come to be equated with national security in the middle of the last century.

What's sinister to Phillips is the way the Bush family, using that vast network of business, intelligence and government connections, managed to elect not just one president against all political odds (George H.W. Bush lost two Texas Senate races, only to be saved by Nixon with appointments as ambassador to China and then CIA director) but an incredible two. Given the size of the first Bush loss to Bill Clinton in 1992, as well as the mediocrity of the son who aspired to succeed him, Phillips finds it astonishing that the family was able to use its vast web of shadowy and sunshiny connections again to "restore" the Bush dynasty in the White House -- "a turn that would have surprised and presumably appalled the founding fathers," he writes.

Now, a surprised and appalled Phillips observes, we have a second George Bush running the country and advancing his family's perverse agenda: serving the rich domestically, increasing the dominance of the energy industry, enlarging the security state, and pursuing a bumbling foreign policy that's clearly made the world less safe, from Afghanistan to Iraq to the Middle East.

Phillips is at his best showing how the sins of the first George Bush continue to plague the U.S., which must now suffer the sins of the son. Clearly we're still living with the consequences of so many Reagan-Bush foreign policy bungles today: backing the mujahedin in Afghanistan against the Soviets, which gave rise to the al-Qaida-sheltering Taliban; arming Saddam to fight Iran during the Iran-Iraq war; playing games with Iran, too, first through the 1980 "October surprise" (there's strong evidence that Bush, along with Reagan campaign manager Bill Casey, another spymaster, played a role in reaching out to Iran's leaders to prevent a pre-election release of the U.S. hostages that might have helped Jimmy Carter), then with the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal at the end of Reagan's term. He also traces the political, personal and financial ties between the Bush family and the House of Saud, which has driven a foreign policy that's coddled the Saudis, who have, arguably, in turn coddled al-Qaida.

Then there was the first Gulf War, launched after Bush signaled to his former ally Saddam that invading Kuwait wouldn't trigger U.S. military action, then changed his mind, then ended the war without toppling Saddam, then encouraged the Kurds and Shiites to revolt, then abandoned them to Saddam's vengeance, finally leaving Iraq a cesspool of weapons and tyranny and suffering for the Clinton administration to deal with. You can see in today's headlines the legacy of all those bad decisions, which are costing Americans and Iraqis and Afghans their lives every day. The notion of "blowback" from disastrous American foreign-policy adventures has been a staple of lefty debate for years, but the conservative Phillips sees blowback from Bush mistakes everywhere, and documents it throughout the book.

How do the Bushes evade a public backlash against these foreign policy disasters? Phillips' most disturbing chapter may be the one on the religious right's rise to power, to which George W. Bush owes his presidency. He learned from his father's 1992 defeat, which many blamed on his failure to court the culture warriors and evangelicals who never trusted the Eastern elitist, formerly pro-choice president. He was his father's liaison to the Christian right in both the 1988 and '92 campaigns, and it paid off for him in 2000. Although he only got 48 percent of the vote overall, Bush drew a staggering 84 percent of Christian evangelicals -- only 75 percent of them went for Ronald Reagan -- and they form the backbone of his base. Phillips details how, even as Americans overall have gradually become less religious, power and numbers have shifted from mainline Christian churches -- Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians and so on -- to more conservative, fundamentalist sectors. Where the mainline Protestant groups, when getting involved in social issues, tended to take on the plight of the poor, the fundamentalists are more concerned about abortion, gay rights, school prayer and individual salvation through Jesus Christ.

Next page: Has Bush been anointed to bring on the Day of Judgment? Some fundamentalists may think so