a.k.a. the south end of a northbound horse.
Posted on 01/23/2004 5:38:47 AM PST by OESY
AMERICAN DYNASTY Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush. By Kevin Phillips. 397 pp. New York: Viking. $25.95. In "American Dynasty," his furious jeremiad against the Bush family, Kevin Phillips does not explicate the many differences between President George W. Bush and his father, or their very different brands of foreign policy. Instead he delivers a high-decibel, high-dudgeon rant against what he sees as their dynastic ambitions and their shared biases and motives.
"Dynasties," he declares at the start of this book, "tend to show continuities of policy and interest-group bias — in the case of the Bushes, favoritism toward the energy sector, defense industries, the Pentagon and the C.I.A., as well as insistence on tax breaks for the investor class and upper-income groups."
Mr. Phillips worked in the Nixon administration and made his name back in 1969 with "The Emerging Republican Majority," a book that predicted the ascendancy of the G.O.P. In recent years, however, he has become a populist social critic, increasingly focused on the gap between the rich and poor, and to his mind the Bush family embodies the worst sort of elitism. In these pages he accuses family members of Machiavellian deception and "blatant business cronyism" with ties to big corporations, big oil and the military-industrial complex.
"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)," he writes, "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."
A compilation of all manner of charges against Bush family members, "American Dynasty" is a huge mixed salad of a book. It tosses thoughtful meditations on the blowback effect of America's involvement in the Middle East and disquieting analyses of the two Bush administrations' ties to Enron and Halliburton, together with meandering discussions about the Ivy League-old-boy-network and shrill denunciations of the role that Texas machismo has supposedly played in three American wars (Lyndon B. Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam War and the two Bush administration wars against Saddam Hussein).
There are biting riffs indebted to the work of other writers like Molly Ivins, Michael Lind, Chalmers Johnson and Seymour M. Hersh; strained efforts to connect a wide array of scandals and possible scandals (from family links to firms with investments in Nazi Germany to the Iran Contra affair); and large heapings of conspiratorial conjecture that undermine the more persuasive arguments in this volume.
As he's done in earlier books, Mr. Phillips tries to coin a lot of historical analogies. In his 2002 book, "Wealth and Democracy," he drew comparisons between America and imperial powers like Britain, Holland and Hapsburg Spain, warning of symptoms that can eventually afflict great capitalist powers. In these pages he draws comparisons between George W. Bush's recapture of the White House eight years after his father's defeat by Bill Clinton, and the English Stuart and French Bourbon restorations. For Mr. Phillips the Bush "restoration" is an alarming development, contrary to the American political tradition.
He argues that restorations usually follow "some national trauma," and that restored rulers usually display "many of the same biases and tendencies that had undone the deposed kings." In the case of the Bushes he provides a laundry list of qualities he sees as shared traits: from an adolescent sense of humor and penchant for mangled syntax, to what he calls an "economic worldview" predicated upon an "open favoritism to the rich."
As for the two wars against Iraq, he contends that both Bush administrations demonstrated a "lack of presidential clarity and candor about the purpose for which the war was being fought," including a drive to control the region's oil, "even if the motivation was less about short-term U.S. oil supplies and more about future geopolitical power."
Mr. Phillips is eloquent on the continuing fallout of American decisions, beginning in the 70's, to pour huge amounts of armaments into the tinderbox of the Persian Gulf and Middle East, into countries "menaced by religious and resource conflicts." He also raises disturbing conflict-of-interest questions about the Bush family's intertwining political and business relationships around the world, relationships embodied by Bush Senior's post-presidential affiliation with the Carlyle Group, a merchant bank with military-sector investments.
The narrative of "American Dynasty," however, is so discursive, its ambitions so amorphous, that the book all too often devolves into a simple litany of accusations against the Bushes, some grounded in careful research, others based on little more than innuendo and speculation.
Intent on underscoring similarities between Bush the elder and Bush the younger, Mr. Phillips tends to skate over their considerable differences: most notably, the current president's tilt toward a unilateralist, moralistic and pre-emptive foreign policy and his father's inclination toward a more internationalist realpolitik.
Mr. Phillips prattles on repetitiously about the role that Skull and Bones, a Yale secret society, might have played in shaping a Bush predilection for secrecy. And he peppers his text with labored analogies, going so far as to suggest that if Hillary Rodham Clinton is elected president in 2008, "public perception might well lurch toward some American equivalent of the 15th-century Wars of the Roses, during which the English Crown was contested by the houses of York and Lancaster."
Such hyperbole, like Mr. Phillips's suggestion that "one could plausibly argue that the pull on George W. Bush toward war with Saddam Hussein was as much a family legacy as were his admissions to Andover, Yale, and Skull and Bones," distract attention from the more substantive and credible points he wants to make. In the end they make "American Dynasty" feel less like a considered examination of the Bush family legacy and more like an ill-tempered diatribe filmed by Oliver Stone.
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