Rise of a ruling-class family

Well might embattled Americans, weary of warfare in the Holy Land, yearn for the simple "family" issues propounded in the cultural politics of the 1980s and 1990s -- most 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 "family-related" trend taking the United States into the 21st 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, "family" 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 18th century republic to be re-conceptualized as an embattled 21st century imperium, threatened by dangers and strains not unlike those that plagued 3rd and 4th century Rome.

The central purpose of this book is to interweave several strands of analysis and thought that need to be considered together if we are 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 elites -- from investment banking and oil to the military-industrial complex. The third is the 20th and early 21st-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 post-World War II emergence of the CIA and rise of the national security state.

Until now, our political history has embodied a different, mid-century 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 "present at the creation," to use Acheson's 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 nation's 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 entourage -- and 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 Bush's family connections, gung ho spirit, personal likeability and social outreach. Similar considerations helped to guide President Ford's 1975 selection of him to head the CIA, a famous repository of Yale alumni. Bush wanted to be -- and perhaps was -- taken 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 grandfathers -- George Herbert Walker, a well-connected St. Louis financier, and Samuel Prescott Bush, a wealthy Ohio railroad equipment manufacturer -- had 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.

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