February 8, 2004
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
rcquired 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.