by Kitty Kelley
Although Americans are not constitutionally inclined to support royalty, they have historically gravitated to political dynasties like the Roosevelts, the Tafts, the Rockefellers, the Kennedys, and now the Bushes. These dynastic politicians, who have been described as “Democracy’s Dukes” and “Princes of Populism,” launch their campaigns with a phalanx of relatives, which invigorates the political process as voters identify with the family’s trials and triumphs. No institution is more highly prized and praised in our country than the family. People can become so seduced by the image of a good, solid family that they will overlook transgressions that might not be so readily forgiven in someone else, the rationale being “He can’t be all that bad, because he comes from such a good family,” or “His mother is terrific,” or “I so admired his grandfather.” As the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David McCullough said, “If you thought George Bush was just wonderful, you think it’s great that his son is coming along. You hope that he’ll be as good or maybe even better than his father.
“I think one thing people love about the Bushes is that against all the modern-day odds, they look like this huge happy family that gets together all the time . . . If you’re a president who is trying to make a connection with people, the fact that you’re at the center of that kind of family goes a long way.”
If the foundation of a dynasty is its image as a good, solid family, then its binding elements are marriages that defy divorce or scandal. Frequently, a dynasty draws its strength from merger, or intermarriage between two strong families—the Aldriches and the Rockefellers, the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, the Walkers and the Bushes. Here, the dynamic of extended families works to propel the family name into high political office and becomes practically unbeatable.
A dynasty’s heaviest burden is carried by its women—the mothers, who produce the progeny and make the presidents. These wives must be as indomitable as the ambitious men they marry. In that sense, Abigail Adams shares much in common with Dorothy Walker Bush. Both sturdy, independent women of intelligence, they were gifted writers with no college educations who did not hesitate to express themselves. Both religious, they cherished their marriages, shared their husbands’ careers, and produced sons who adored them.
History shows that most presidents are beloved by their mothers and that these mama’s boys grow up having what Freud called “the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success.”
No political dynasty can survive without strong and enduring mothers like Abigail Adams, Sara Delano Roosevelt, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, and Dorothy Walker Bush. It’s the women who give such families their ballast and longevity. For a dynasty to survive and thrive, the mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives must be warriors, as tough and battle-tested as the fathers, sons, brothers, and husbands.
Within the Bush family, it’s the women, not the men, who elevate the lineage. After studying the bloodlines of American presidents, Gary Boyd Roberts of the New England Historic Genealogical Society found that the Bush men are far less important than the women they marry. “The Bushes’ line of royal descent is traced through the females, not the males, as is the family’s Mayflower lines,” he said. He found the Bushes are even “kin of kin” of Pocahontas, the Native American princess: she’s said to have saved the life of Captain John Smith by holding his head in her arms to prevent her father’s warriors from clubbing him to death.
George Herbert Walker Bush seemed to finally accept his family’s place in history when he threw open the doors of his presidential library in College Station, Texas, on March 11, 2002, to an exhibit on the American political dynasty. The display was organized with his blessing, and the highlight of the exposition, titled Fathers and Sons: Two Families, Four Presidents, focused on the dynasties of the Adamses and the Bushes.
The two presidential families span the history of America: John Adams, the second President, was inaugurated in the eighteenth century; his son John Quincy Adams became President in the nineteenth century. The elder Bush assumed the presidency in the twentieth century, and his son George Walker Bush was the first President inaugurated in the twenty-first century.
The dynastic similarities between the Adams family and the Bush family are slight, but those that exist are basic to their political success.
John Adams grew up on a farm in Braintree, Massachusetts, milking cows. George Herbert Walker Bush grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, playing tennis. Both New Englanders were well educated—Adams went to Harvard, Bush went to Yale—and both shared a respect for writing letters. Several pieces of correspondence in the exhibit at College Station contrasted Adams’s elegant cursive with Bush’s jerky left-handed scrawl. Adams, a voracious reader, devoured books and studied in Latin and Greek. Bush earned a Phi Beta Kappa key after three years of college, although he read little as an adult. Each man carried the title Ambassador, and each served eight years as Vice President under a beloved President.
Adams chafed at the ceremonial role he had to play for George Washington, but George Bush relished standing in for Ronald Reagan.
As president of the Senate, John Adams frequently lectured the legislators on their responsibilities; in the same position, George H.W. Bush backslapped his way through the corridors of power, eager to be liked and loath to offend.
Both men became President, but when running for reelection, each suffered a crushing defeat. Historians judged both harshly, pronouncing their presidencies failures. Both fathers lived to see their firstborn sons become President, albeit amid extraordinary controversies. John Quincy Adams and George Walker Bush each won the White House while losing the popular vote. Adams’s presidency had to be decided by the House of Representatives; Bush’s by the Supreme Court. Both men defeated challengers from Tennessee.
David McCullough described John Quincy Adams as “the most intelligent man ever to occupy the Oval Office.” Q., as his father called him, was a child prodigy. He traveled to Europe at the age of ten, learned to speak several languages, including fluent French, wrote the Monroe Doctrine, and served as Secretary of State.
Boston University’s presidential historian Robert Dallek pronounced W., as George Walker Bush is called, “the stupidest man ever to sit in the Oval Office.” A mediocre student, young Bush sailed into Yale on the legacy coattails of his father, his grandfather, his great-great-grandfather, his five uncles, his seven great-uncles, and his five great-great-uncles. Until he became President at the age of fifty-four, W. had never traveled to Europe. As governor of Texas for five years, he learned Spanish por la calle (by the street) and dismissed as effete anyone who spoke fluent French.
Despite their many differences, the Adams and Bush families share one dominant characteristic that defines their success. Both are anchored by strong marriages, which enable each to be admired as a good family. Nothing sustains political success more than the image of a good, moral, and happy family—it is a dynasty’s pearl and most potent appeal. The electorate is reassured by the picture of supportive parents, hearty children, and scampering grandchildren. The image of a good family is embraced by voters as worthy of admiration and automatically imbues a candidate with the characteristics necessary for leadership.
“What matters is family and I can’t emphasize that enough,” George Herbert Walker Bush has said on numerous occasions. “Family and faith and friends . . .” To his supporters, the elder Bush embodies the American ideal of a good family man. People bask in the glow of his public image as a faithful husband and faultless father; people want to believe that he and his family have achieved their prominence in American life not because they have spun a shadowy web of oil and money and influence that they sustained through four generations with political muscle but because, as the Bushes have said so often about themselves, they cherish their children, they practice their religion, and they encourage public service. Most important, they exemplify good values.
The politicians in the family—George Herbert Walker Bush and his two
sons George and Jeb—have accepted the need for a good family image as an undeniable fact of life. This accounts, in part, for the deceptions of each in presenting his marriage to the electorate as a solid partnership. At various points in their political careers, all three men proclaimed themselves ideal husbands who had been faithful to their wives. Those who knew differently kept a discreet silence, which enabled the Bushes to advance politically and present their dynasty as a moral bulwark.
Still, the word “dynasty” continues to annoy the elder Bush. Even surrounded by dynastic artifacts at his presidential library, he railed against “all this legacy crud” and “dynasty crap.” He appeared to be insulted by the unfair advantage implied by the words, especially the sense of entitlement.
“No legacy,” he insisted. “No feeling of ‘This is a generational thing, we must pass the torch.’ No feeling like now the mantle must fall on our grandson George P. Bush.” The subject of his grandson—the eldest child of Jeb and Columba Bush—had not been raised, but the former President offered his unsolicited assessment of the young man: “He’s a very attractive kid.”
Years before, in an unguarded moment, George H.W. Bush had bragged about the dynastic potential of his children over that of the Kennedys. “Just wait until my boys get out there,” he said. His mother was appalled by his boastfulness and pounced on him for sounding like “the great I am.” Dorothy Walker Bush reminded her adult son that she had not raised him to be a braggart. Abruptly chastened, George deflected any and all comparisons to the Kennedys.
“We’re not like them,” he told The New York Times on January 31, 2000. “We don’t do press about everything, and we certainly don’t see ourselves as a dynasty. ‘D’ and ‘L’—those words, dynasty and legacy—irritate me. We don’t feel entitled to anything.”
His son sang the same song. “I don’t hate the word dynasty, but it’s not really true,” George W. Bush told Time magazine when he was running for President and his brother Jeb was running for governor of Florida. “Dynasty means something inherited . . . Both Jeb and I know you don’t inherit a vote. You have to win a vote. We inherited a good name, but you don’t inherit a vote.”
Their father had spent his political life trying to camouflage his country-club roots. He had traded tasseled loafers for cowboy boots when he moved from Connecticut to Texas, but it was always a tight squeeze. Figuratively, he could not drop Greenwich lockjaw for a folksy Texas drawl. Now, in 2001, at the age of seventy-seven, with one son in the White House and another the governor of Florida, the former President, whose father had been a U.S. senator, sounded ridiculous as he protested against the word “dynasty.” His friends said he was understandably proud of the political success his family had achieved but he was afraid to admit it for fear he might sound arrogant. He had always grappled with the contradictions of being an elitist while trying to look like a man of the people.
Privately, the former President could not hide his delight over the historical connection between the Bushes and the Adamses. When the younger Bush became President, the elder Bush teasingly called him “Quincy.” But only within the family. George W. Bush acknowledged his unique position when he hung an imposing portrait of John Quincy Adams in the small dining room off the Oval Office. He later signed a bill to authorize building a memorial on federal land in Washington, D.C., to honor John Adams and his family, which by extension would honor George Bush and his family.
In the summer of 2001 the former President played golf with his son. Both wore baseball caps—one marked “41,” the other “43.” The following year on the golf course, “43” appeared in a cap that said “El Jefe.” By then the dynamic between father and son had changed, and their conflicted relationship was being played out on the international stage with consequences that reached far beyond their own world.
Supporters of the former President felt reassured in 2001 as they saw the inexperienced new President surround himself with veterans of his father’s administration. The elder Bush had driven his son’s decision to choose Richard B. Cheney as Vice President; Cheney had served Bush 41 as Secretary of Defense. The former President also pushed for Colin Powell to be his son’s Secretary of Defense. Powell had served the former President as National Security Adviser and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But the presidency of Bush 43 was not to be a reprise of Bush 41.
The new President assumed office determined not to repeat his father’s mistakes. Unlike the former President, George W. said his first priority was to protect his political base. And that’s exactly what he did. Despite his campaign oratory, his core supporters were not “compassionate conservatives.” George W. knew that it was the radicalized right who looked upon him as a warrior. So within forty-eight hours of his inaugural, he issued an executive order banning U.S. government aid to international family-planning groups that perform abortions or provide abortion counseling. He also signed a bill requiring that a fetus that showed signs of life following an abortion procedure be considered a person under federal law. He later signed a law prohibiting partial-birth abortion. The measure, which had been vetoed twice by Clinton, was the most significant restriction on abortion rights in years. Federal judges in Nebraska, San Francisco, and New York ruled that the law was unconstitutional, but the President did not care. He had accommodated his evangelical base. His Attorney General, John Ashcroft, another evangelical, announced that to defend the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, the Justice Department would subpoena patients’ records when doctors sued and argued that the law interfered with necessary life-saving procedures.
By defining a fetus as a person, the President had forced himself into taking a hard line against providing federal funds for embryonic-stem-cell research. His decision will hamper scientific research for decades. Embryonic cells, which give rise to all types of specialized cells in the human body, are said by scientists to hold great promise for the potential treatment of diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and juvenile diabetes. But people who oppose abortion abhor the research because the embryo is destroyed in the process of extracting the stem cells.
Former First Lady Nancy Reagan, tending her husband, who was dying of Alzheimer’s, urged the President to back stem-cell studies. Instead, he restricted federal funding to only sixty stem-cell lines already in existence. He felt his compromised decision was the perfect political—if not moral—solution. He had satisfied his anti-abortion supporters while giving something to those in his own party who wanted the federal government to advance rather than hinder research into debilitating diseases.
He had alienated Nancy Reagan forever. Ron Reagan Jr. said his mother felt estranged from the Republican Party over the President’s opposition to embryonic-stem-cell research. “She distrusts some of these [Bush] people. She gets that they’re trouble in all kinds of ways. She doesn’t like their religious fervor, their aggression,” he said. “Now, ignorance is one thing, ignorance can be cured. But many of the Republican leaders opposing this research know better, people like [Senate Majority Leader] Bill Frist, who’s a doctor, for God’s sake. People like him are blocking it to pander to the 20 percent of their base who are mouth-breathers. And that’s unconscionable—there are lives at stake here. Stem-cell research can revolutionize medicine more than anything since antibiotics.”
The new President was not afraid of controversy. Three days into office, he stepped over the constitutional line separating church and state by announcing his intention to make federal funds available to faith-based groups that provided social services. He said, “A compassionate society is one that recognizes the great power of faith.” Over $1.1 billion was disbursed by the Bush administration to Christian groups. No Jews or Muslims received funds. The President put no accounting procedures into his faith-based grants, which meant there were no guidelines or restrictions on how the money was to be spent. As a result, the funds rarely reached those who most needed help. Over time W.’s “faith-based initiative” came to look exactly like what it was: a pol
itical payoff to church groups to keep them voting Republican.
Bush 43 used the presidency of Bush 41 as a template for what not to do. His father had paid no attention to his reelection campaign until it was too late. George W. started running for reelection at the time he took office, and by 2004 he had raised over $200 million to run against Senator John Kerry. Having determined that his father’s worst mistake was to raise taxes after promising not to, George W. decided to cut taxes. In the first year he initiated a series of cuts worth $1.35 trillion. When critics closely examined the plan and pointed out that only the wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers would divvy up 28 percent of the windfall while the poorest 60 percent would split only 8 percent of the benefits, Bush accused them of engaging in “class warfare.” The Princeton economist Paul Krugman wrote in The New York Times that the nation could not possibly afford these tax cuts if the Bush administration was to keep its promises in such areas as education, health care, and military defense. The Financial Times looked at the Bush tax bill and declared, “The lunatics are now in charge of the asylum.”
As a presidential candidate, Governor Bush had initiated what he called a “charm offensive” toward the press; as President, he was charmless and defensive. He refused to read newspapers, other than box scores and headlines. “I’m more interested in news [than opinions],” he told Brit Hume of Fox News, “and the best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.”
Even as President, George W. evinced a lifelong pattern: he was not someone who wished to educate himself about life’s issues. He wanted only to have his uninformed opinions and beliefs supported and confirmed. This lack of intellectual curiosity combined with dynastic arrogance was to have life-and-death consequences later in his presidency.