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Bush Family Values: War, Wealth, Oil
Four generations have created an unsavory web of links that could prove an
election-year Achilles' heel for the president.
By Kevin Phillips, Kevin Phillips' new book, just published, is
"American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in
the House of Bush."
WASHINGTON — Despite February polls showing
President Bush losing his early reelection lead, he's still
the favorite. No modern president running unopposed
in his party's primaries and caucuses has ever lost in
November.
But there may be a key to undoing that precedent. The
two Bush presidencies are so closely linked, especially
over Iraq, that the 43rd can't be understood apart from
the 41st. Beyond that, for a full portrait of what the
Bushes are about, we must return to the family's
emergence on the national scene in the early 20th
century.
This four-generation evolution of the Bushes involves
multiple links that could become Bush's election-year
Achilles' heel — if a clever and tough 2004 Democratic
opponent can punch and slice at them. Massachusetts
Sen. John F. Kerry, the clear Democratic front-runner,
could be best positioned to do so. In the late 1980s
and early 1990s, he investigated the Iran-Contra and
Bank of Credit and Commerce International scandals,
both of which touched George H.W. Bush's Saudi,
Iraqi and Middle Eastern arms-deal entanglements.
Washington lawyer Jack Blum, the ace investigator for
Kerry's subcommittee back then, is said to be advising
him now, which could be meaningful. Ironically, the
Bush family's century of involvement in oil, armaments
and global intrigue has never been at the center of the
national debate since the Bushes starting running for
president in 1980.
The reason? Insufficient public knowledge. The only Bush biography published
before George H.W. Bush won election in 1988 was a puff job written by a
former press secretary, and the biographies of George W. Bush in 2000 barely
mentioned his forefathers. Millions of Republicans who have loyally voted for
Bushes in three presidential elections simply have no idea. Here are circumstances
and biases especially worth noting.
The Bushes and the military-industrial complex: George H. Walker and
Samuel Prescott Bush were the dynasty's founding fathers during the years of and
after World War I. Walker, a St. Louis financier, made his mark in corporate
reorganizations and war contracts. By 1919, he was enlisted by railroad heir W.
Averell Harriman to be president of Wall Street-based WA Harriman, which
invested in oil, shipping, aviation and manganese, partly in Russia and Germany,
during the 1920s. Sam Bush, the current president's other great-grandfather, ran
an Ohio company, Buckeye Steel Castings, that produced armaments. In 1917,
he went to Washington to head the small arms, ammunition and ordnance section
of the federal War Industries Board. Both men were present at the emergence of
what became the U.S. military-industrial complex.
Prescott Bush, the Connecticut senator and grandfather of the current president,
had some German corporate ties at the outbreak of World War II, but the better
yardstick of his connections was his directorships of companies involved in U.S.
war production. Dresser Industries, for example, produced the incendiary bombs
dropped on Tokyo and made gaseous diffusion pumps for the atomic bomb
project. George H.W. Bush later worked for Dresser's oil-services businesses.
Then, as CIA director, vice president and president, one of his priorities was the
U.S. weapons trade and secret arms deals with Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the
moujahedeen in Afghanistan.
In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about
how "we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether
sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." That complex's recent
mega-leap to power came under George H.W. Bush and even more under
George W. Bush — with the post-9/11 expansion of the military and creation of
the Department of Homeland Security. But armaments and arms deals seem to
have been in the Bushes' blood for nearly a century.
Oil: The Bushes' ties to John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil go back 100
years, when Rockefeller made Buckeye Steel Castings wildly successful by
convincing railroads that carried their oil to buy heavy equipment from Buckeye.
George H. Walker helped refurbish the Soviet oil industry in the 1920s, and
Prescott Bush acquired experience in the international oil business as a 22-year
director of Dresser Industries. George H.W. Bush, in turn, worked for Dresser
and ran his own offshore oil-drilling business, Zapata Offshore. George W. Bush
mostly raised money from investors for oil businesses that failed. Currently, the
family's oil focus is principally in the Middle East.
Enron is another family connection. The company's Kenneth L. Lay made his first
connections with George H.W. Bush in the early 1980s when the latter was
working on energy deregulation. When Bush became president in 1989, he gave
Lay two prominent international roles: membership on the President's Export
Council and the task of planning for a G-7 summit in Houston. Lay parlayed that
exposure into new business overseas and clout with Washington agencies. Family
favoritism soon followed. When Bush senior lost the 1992 election, Lay picked
up with son George W., first in Texas and then as a top contributor to Bush's
2000 presidential campaign. Before Enron imploded in late 2001, it had more
influence in a new administration than any other corporation in memory.
The intelligence community: Bushes and Walkers have been involved with the
intelligence community since World War I. The importance of Sam Bush's
wartime munitions-regulating role was obvious. During the 1920s, when George
H. Walker was doing a lot of business in Russia and Germany, he became a
director of the American International Corporation, formed during the war for
purposes of overseas investment and intelligence-gathering. Prescott Bush's
pre-1941 corporate and banking contacts with Germany, sensationalized on
many Internet sites, appear to have been passed along to officials in government
and intelligence circles.
George H.W. Bush may have had CIA connections before the agency's
unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. A number of published
sources suggest that Zapata Offshore was a CIA front long before he went on to
become director of Central Intelligence in 1976. As for George W. Bush, his
limited ties are said to have come through investments in, and buyouts of, several
of his oil businesses by CIA- and BCCI-connected firms and individuals.
Top 1% economics: Over four generations, the Bush family has been involved
with more than 20 securities firms, banks, brokerage houses and investment
management firms, ranging from Wall Street giants like Brown Brothers Harriman
and E.F. Hutton to small firms like J. Bush & Co. and Riggs Investment
Management Corp. This relentless record of handling money for rich people has
bred a vocational hauteur. In their eyes, the economic top 1% of Americans are
the ones who count. Investors and their inheritors are favored — a good
explanation of why George W. Bush has cut taxes on both dividends and estates,
where most of the benefit goes to the top 1%. Over the course of George H.W.
Bush's career, he was close to a number of the merger kings and
leveraged-buyout specialists of the 1980s who came from Oklahoma and Texas:
T. Boone Pickens, Henry Kravis and Hugh Liedtke. "Little guy" economics has
almost no niche in the Bush economic worldview.
Debt and deficits: Whenever a Bush is president, private debt and government
deficits seem to grow. Middle- and low-income Americans borrow to offset the
income squeeze of recessions. The hallmark of Bush economics during both
presidencies has been favoritism toward capital over workers. Federal budget
deficits have soared because of a combination of upper-bracket tax favors,
middle-income job shrinkage, big federal spending to hype election-year
economic growth, huge defense outlays and overseas military spending for the
wars in Iraq and elsewhere. Imperial hubris costs a lot of money.
Politically, over four generations the Bush past has been prologue. Despite
George W. Bush's new good ol' boy image — cowboy boots and born-again ties
to the religious right — his basic tendencies go in the same directions — oil,
crony capitalism, top 1% economics and military-industrial-establishment loyalties
— that the previous Bush and Walker generations have traveled. The old biases
and loyalties seem ineradicable; so, too, for old grudges, like the two-generation
fixation on Saddam Hussein.
The presidency is an old Bush ambition. As early as the 1940s, Barbara Bush
talked to friends about becoming first lady. The current president's grandfather,
Prescott Bush, told his wife before he retired in 1962 that he wished he'd been
president. By 1963, George W. Bush, a student at Andover Academy, was
talking about his own father's desire to be president.
In short, the word "dynasty" fits the Bushes all too well. They have had plenty of
time to sort out their ambitions, loyalties and intentions. They know what they're
in politics for — although this year may pose a new problem. The American
people are also starting to find out. |
