Book Reviews

Portrait of a Dynasty by Peter and Rochelle Schweizer. New York, 2004: Doubleday, xvii, 577 pp., ISBN 0-385-49863-2. $27.95.

Of the 43 men who have served as presidents of the United States since 1789, only two have been the sons of previous presidents. John Quincy Adams, the sixth president, was the son of John Adams, the second president; and George Walker Bush, the 43rd and incumbent president, is the son of George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st president. Is a family that contributes two of its members to the presidency a “dynasty,” as suggested by the title of Peter and Rochelle Schweizers’ book? Obviously they are not in the same sense as the Habsburgs or Bourbons were dynasties—but like John Adams and his descendants, the Bushes are a remarkable family, and equally worthy of our interest and study.

The Schweizers begin their story with Samuel Prescott Bush, the great-grandfather of George W. Bush. S. P. Bush was the son of an Episcopalian minister from New Jersey. Unlike his father and grandfather, who had been educated at Yale (which then mainly prepared its students to be clergymen or lawyers), S. P. enrolled at the much newer and less prestigious Stevens Institute of Technology on Long Island. As the Schweizers note,

. . . while Stevens lacked the history and spires of Yale, it offered something S. P. was more interested in, namely the new field of scientific management and engineering.

 Samuel Prescott Bush was thus equipped with the precise skills needed to succeed in the then-burgeoning industrialization of the American economy. He first found employment with the Pennsylvania Railroad, and later with Buckeye Malleable Iron and Coupler Company (later renamed Buckeye Steel), a manufacturer of railroad equipment. Buckeye was an ailing business at the time S. P. joined it, but he was instrumental in restoring it to profitability. His association with Buckeye led him into business and social contact with Franklin Rockefeller, the younger brother of John D. Rockefeller. In 1907 Franklin, described by the Schweizers as a “bad manager,” turned the business over to S. P. Bush, who was to run it for the next 20 years, establishing himself as a significant manufacturing industrialist and founding his family’s fortune.

S. P. Bush’s eldest son, Prescott Bush, attended Yale as his grandfather had done, but also went into commerce, first as a salesman for Simmons Hardware Company of St. Louis. While in St. Louis, Prescott met and married Dorothy Walker. She was the younger daughter of George Herbert Walker, a regional investment banker with connections to Guaranty Trust Co. and J. P. Morgan. Though Prescott Bush initially pursued work in manufacturing, as his father had done, he was eventually to enter the investment banking field through his connections with fellow Yale alumnus W. Averell Harriman. Harriman’s firm later merged with Brown Brothers, forming the well-known private bankers Brown Brothers, Harriman, in which Prescott Bush became a partner. Prescott’s political interests led him to run for the Senate in Connecticut, and his election marked the first entry of a Bush family member into public service.

The Schweizers understandably devote much more of their book to the careers of the two Presidents Bush than to their parents and grandparents, but the lives of these ancestors are important to an understanding of their sons and grandsons. The forward looking, risk-taking attitudes of Samuel Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker are also seen in the lives of George Herbert Walker Bush and George Walker Bush. The elder President Bush (“Bush 41”), like his grandfathers, first looked to commerce and industry rather than to law, academia, or the church for a career. The Schweizers describe in detail his early life, his education at Andover and Yale, his war service, and marriage to Barbara Pierce. This was followed, not by taking a comfortable berth in government or in his father’s investment firm, but by a venture into the oil business in Texas, where his son George Walker Bush was born. Just as Samuel Prescott Bush had sent his children to public schools in Columbus, Ohio, rather than to the exclusive private academies that catered to families having his means, so George H. W. Bush first sent his sons to public schools in Midland, Texas. Although the younger Bush (“Bush 43”) was also to attend Andover and Yale as his father had done, he too preferred to return to Texas and the private sector, in which he spent most of his life prior to running for Governor of Texas.

The circumstances of both Bush 41’s and Bush 43’s public lives are well detailed in the Schweizers’ book, and it is unnecessary to summarize them here. What the Schweizers have most notably illustrated in their book is not the dates, places, and accomplishments of their subjects (although they have done this well), but rather their character and thinking, and the influences that have formed them. This is well worth our attention.

One point that is always raised about the Bushes by their political opponents is that they are a rich family, accustomed to “privilege.” Indeed, members of the Bush family have had wealth far surpassing that of most American citizens. It is important to note, however, that this is true of many persons in public life. The Democrats, America’s socialist party in all but name, has long tried to play the class-warfare game by suggesting that Republicans, who generally defend private property and free enterprise, are the party of the rich. This suggestion does not stand up to examination. Some of the country’s wealthiest politicians are Democrats. They include, for example, Sen. Jon Corzine (D., N.J.), formerly a Goldman, Sachs partner; Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D., Conn.), heir to a substantial family business; and Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.), who has prospered through twice marrying into money. If Sen. Kerry should be elected president this November, he and his wife (the former Teresa Heinz, widow of Sen. John Heinz, the ketchup heir) will be the richest couple ever to occupy the White House.

Kerry’s and Bush’s social backgrounds are superficially similar: both are Yale alumni, both were members of Skull and Bones at Yale, both are people of high net worth. There, however, the similarities end. Kerry has been a relentless social climber, and has simultaneously swallowed whole the conventional wisdom taught at places like Yale, which teaches that private wealth and the social distinction conferred by it are to be deprecated in Marxist fashion. The ability to live untroubled by such contradiction reflects, if not simple hypocrisy, a most peculiar psychological makeup. Maybe we should not be surprised that a man who is untroubled at garnering his fortunes through parasitizing rich women, is untroubled by the absurdity of his telling small-business and professional men, who possess not a hundredth part of his own patrimony, to the effect that they are “privileged” and must pay more taxes! By contrast, George W. Bush spent most of his life in the private sector and has always abhorred the fashionable socialism of the Ivy League. Both men belong to the American plutocracy, but it is clear that Bush is much closer to Main Street and Middle America, in his beliefs if not in his family’s history and socioeconomic status.

Finally, a word is in order about the stridency with which both Bushes, but particularly the incumbent president, have been attacked. It sometimes seems as if the political dialogue in the United States has degenerated into a shouting match, with exorbitant and hyperbolic defamation being traded between opponents. Bush 43, like many people, is not a good extemporaneous speaker; his occasional tongue-tied performance has been twisted into the suggestion that he is a moron and fool. His former business associations have led to the charge that the war in Iraq was a plot to line the pockets of his cronies in the oil industry. The most outlandish accusation is that the attacks of September 11, 2001, took place with the prior knowledge of the Bush administration and were intended as a pretext for curtailing of civil liberty and a sinister “power grab” by a varied cast of plotters in “big business.”

Before we bemoan the modern loss of civility too loudly, it is illustrative to consider what has been said about previous presidents. John Adams was accused of monarchical intentions; Thomas Jefferson, of wishing to introduce the violence and irreligion of the French revolution to America’s shores. Abraham Lincoln was depicted as a buffoon and an ape—this in the North! Democrats for years used Herbert Hoover as a punching bag, implying he was personally responsible for the Great Depression. Franklin Roosevelt was widely despised by Republicans. The present reviewer once knew the son of an old Philadelphia main line family, whose father so detested FDR that he framed that president’s portrait in a toilet seat. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, some critics of the Roosevelt administration accused that president of having prior knowledge of the enemy’s intentions, just as Bush-haters today accuse Bush 43 of knowing al Qaeda’s plans before September 11. Dwight Eisenhower, like Bush a poor off-the-cuff speaker, was derided as a simpleton. An off-Broadway musical, “MacBird,” portrayed Lyndon Johnson as complicit in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Ronald Reagan, who was perhaps the most assiduous reader and prolific writer to hold the presidency since Theodore Roosevelt, was characterized as an “amiable dunce,” manipulated by “handlers.” Slurs of the present type are nothing new.

The longer view of history, after the passions of the moment have died, is usually sounder, and quite typically kinder. Every president has deserved just criticism, some more severe than others have; but the vitriol is eventually forgotten, and sometimes a president who was thought quite undistinguished in his own time comes to be regarded as rather better than anyone thought. Harry Truman is the most widely known example. James K. Polk and Grover Cleveland are others whose virtues have become apparent at length. It is anyone’s guess what the result of the 2004 election will be, but we should not be surprised if, in a quarter century, Peter and Rochelle Schweizer’s basically sympathetic portrayals of Bush 41 and 43 reflect the verdict of history more soundly than do the effluvia of Michael Moore or Paul Krugman.

—Michael S. Swisher

“And whatever else history may say about me when I’m gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears, to your confidence rather than your doubts. My dream is that you will travel the road ahead with liberty’s lamp guiding your steps and opportunity’s arm steadying your way. My fondest hope for each one of you—and especially for young people—is that you will love your country, not for her power or wealth, but for her selflessness and her idealism. May each of you have the heart to conceive, the understanding to direct, and the hand to execute works that will make the world a little better for your having been here. May all of you as Americans never forget your heroic origins, never fail to seek divine guidance, and never lose your natural, God-given optimism. And finally, my fellow Americans, may every dawn be a great new beginning for America and every evening bring us closer to that shining city upon a hill.” —Ronald Reagan (1992)