Skulls, Bones, Bloodlines.
Building on his Harper's essay from February 2000, Phillips argues that the Bushes are quite unlike the Adamses, the other father-son presidential pair. The sense of aristocratic entitlement and the sheer speed of the succession after the Clinton interlude suggest that something new is in the air. For Phillips, the four generations of Bush family involvement with intelligence, national security, armaments, energy and resource extraction give it a unique place, outstripping the closest runner-up, the Kennedys. There has been no other 20th-century family as well-placed as the Bushes in taking financial and political advantage of national and international crises, with far-reaching consequences for the world.
If the Bushes represent the peak of dynastization in America, then Phillips also derives solace from this interpretation, because restorations don't last long. The resentment against Charles I led to his execution in 1649, but the revolutionary upheaval caused by Oliver Cromwell led in turn to the restoration of the Stuart heir, Charles II. Similarly, after Louis XVI was executed in 1793, the French soon tired of Napoleon Bonaparte's frequent wars and crises, returning the Bourbon heir, Louis XVIII, to the throne. Cast George Bush père as Charles I or Louis XVI, Bill Clinton as the ogre or "devil figure" analogous to Cromwell or Bonaparte, and George Bush fils as Charles II or Louis XVIII, and you have Phillips' explanatory model. Luckily, the restored Stuart and Bourbon monarchs quickly reminded people of the reasons they had thrown out their predecessors in the first place.
Much of recent American politics can be explained through this prism, but not all. The irrationality of the venom directed against Clinton by voters riled by his lack of pedigree, the certainty with which the Republican establishment coalesced around George W. Bush and the relentless vendetta against Saddam Hussein, all make sense with Phillips' perspective. As Phillips explains, dynasties get their nations embroiled in global struggles, the Middle East being the special province of the Bushes. The exploitation of office or nearness to it for financial gain, as in George H. W. Bush's Carlyle connection, is so shameless that the dynastic explanation begins to hold water.
The Bush family's perennial closeness to intrigue at the international level also fits into the dynastic paradigm. The founding father, George Herbert Walker, was probably involved in intelligence activities after World War I, and Sen. Prescott Bush may well have been a CIA asset, as was George H. W. Bush since his 1960s stint with the oil company Zapata OffShore, if not as early as at Yale in the 1940s. This also explains George W. Bush's penchant for secrecy, including sealing past presidential records that have the potential to embarrass. Phillips hopes that should it come out that 9/11 was preventable, this disgrace will remind the public about George H. W. Bush's scandals: 1980's October Surprise (making Iran hold the hostages until after the election), Iran-Contra and Iraqgate (secretly arming Iraq between 1984-1990).
Even if one grants that the Bush family is indeed located at the critical nexus of various strains of national power?intelligence, national security, armaments and energy?the sequence of causation culminating in their political ascendancy remains in doubt. Is the Bush family perhaps no more than a mirror of the power arrangements that have evolved as a result of America's involvement in global wars? Are they little more than pawns, mere bureaucratic functionaries of the enduring establishment, rather than the history-making Machiavellis others have described more crudely than Phillips?
This flaw in interpretation is from the side of overestimation. Its counterpart is gross underestimation where commentators, busy explaining away the inexplicable, root around for multiple sources of a singular phenomenon. Hence Phillips, like others in recent years, focuses on not one key variable but a number of them, in a classic case of overdetermination. In George W. Bush's case, not only do all the previous predilections of the Bush family have to click, but a new element?the harnessing of the power of the religious right?has to as well.
Phillips labors mightily to arrange the pieces so that they decode the puzzle of the rapid restoration. His analysis of America's dynastization, evident in genealogical searches and aristocratic pretension, could easily be offset by numerous trends working in the direction of cultural egalitarianism. Crony capitalism, another clue to the riddle, hardly seems elevated enough to constitute a building block of dynastization, no matter the depredations of the Enron-Halliburton regime. The deployment of compassionate conservatism?a consistent link among the political Bushes, from Prescott Bush to George H. W. Bush to George W. Bush?is a princely Machiavellian attribute, but the tradition of noblesse oblige has more sincere patrician roots as well.
When it comes to extending the dynastic chain to the two generations preceding George H. W. Bush, Phillips seems to be on thin ice. No matter what twist Phillips might give it, the generation of George Herbert Walker, George H. W. Bush's grandfather, despite its peripheral involvement with intelligence and armaments, does not come across as the diabolical originator of the clan. Any number of blue-blooded WASP families could be identified at the center of interlocking directorates, such as the type Phillips tries to implicate in the supply of arms to Nazi Germany. Despite a compact if unreadable appendix, there is no clear evidence, only insinuation, that the Bush family was involved in illegal supply of armaments to Germany. The argument for involvement with intelligence is similarly circumstantial.
A family that has been an integral part of the Wall Street power elite, with linkages to key military-industrial sectors, is just not scary enough if tainted only by common corruption. Prescott Bush seems to have been little more than a moderate Republican, the kind now going out of style in the Northeast. George H. W. Bush, despite his CIA directorship, was an internationalist of the first order. Without George W. Bush's radical corruptions of American democracy, there would be no dynastization to speak of in retrospective terms. Phillips should be looking forward, in the consequences of a barbarized culture, rather than to the past, to find the key to the Bushes. This may not so much be a restoration as a projection of the future.