American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush - Softcover

Phillips, Kevin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143034316 ISBN 13: 9780143034315

Publisher: Penguin Adult Hc/Tr, 2004

Synopsis

The Bushes are the family nobody really knows, says Kevin Phillips. This popular lack of acquaintance--nurtured by gauzy imagery of Maine summer cottages, gray-haired national grandmothers, July Fourth sparklers, and cowboy boots--has let national politics create a dynasticized presidency that would have horrified America's founding fathers. They, after all, had led a revolution against a succession of royal Georges.

In this devastating book, onetime Republican strategist Phillips reveals how four generations of Bushes have ascended the ladder of national power since World War One, becoming entrenched within the American establishment--Yale, Wall Street, the Senate, the CIA, the vice presidency, and the presidency--through a recurrent flair for old-boy networking, national security involvement, and political deception. By uncovering relationships and connecting facts with new clarity, Phillips comes to a stunning conclusion: The Bush family has systematically used its financial and social empire--its "aristocracy"--to gain the White House, thereby subverting the very core of American democracy. In their ambition, the Bushes ultimately reinvented themselves with brilliant timing, twisting and turning from silver spoon Yankees to born-again evangelical Texans. As America--and the world--holds its breath for the 2004 presidential election, American Dynasty explains how it happened and what it all means.

About this title

Review:

Paraphrasing a passage from Machiavelli's The Prince, Kevin Phillips writes "a ruler can ignore the mob and devote himself to the interests of the ruling class, gulling the inert majority who constitute the ruled". He then says "Borgia references aside, 21st-century American readers of The Prince may feel that they have stumbled on a thinly disguised Bush White House political memo". These pointed words would sting regardless of who uttered them, but coming from Phillips, a former Republican strategist, they have an added piquancy.

In American Dynasty: How the Bush Clan Became the World's Most Powerful and Dangerous Family, Phillips traces the rise of the Bush family from investment banking elites to political power brokers, using their Ivy League network, vast wealth and questionable political manoeuvering to occupy the White House and consequently, shake the foundation of constitutional American democracy. Citing the Bush family mainstays of finance, energy (oil), the military industrial complex and national security and intelligence (the CIA), Phillips uses copious examples to show the dangerous alliance between the Bushes' business interests (huge corporations such as Enron and Haliburton) and the formation of national policy. No other family, Phillips says, that has fulfilled its presidential aspirations has been so involved in the ascendancy of the arms industry and of the 21st-century American imperium--often at the expense of regional and world peace and for their personal gain.

It is hard to tell what offends Phillips the most: the Bushes' systematic deceit and secrecy, their shady business dealings, their cronyism, or their family philosophy that privileges the very wealthy and utterly dismisses all the rest. It is clearly all of these things combined. But at the top of Phillips' list is the dynastic nature of their family power, for it is that concentration of power and influence that strikes at the heart of our democracy. Past administrations have transgressed, albeit not so egregiously and other political families have had dynastic ambitions, but none has succeeded as thoroughly as the Bushes. Jefferson and Madison would be horrified and, according to Phillips, we should be too. --Silvana Tropea, Amazon.com

Review:

"[A] devastating examination.... That this powerful argument has been made by Kevin Phillips should be a measure of how seriously it should be taken. He is not an idealogue of the left and he is not a conspiracy theorist.... American Dynasty is an important, troubling book that should be read everywhere with care." --Washington Post

"Kevin Phillips is no hotheaded bomb-thrower but a seasoned wise man with deep roots in the Republican party. American Dynasty is as depressing as it is brilliant and important." --Chicago Sun-Times

"If Howard Dean (or any other Democrat) is elected president of the United States this year, he (or she) will owe a debt of gratitude to Kevin Phillips." --New York Times Book Review

"Given this left-liberal publishing phenomenon, where evil Bushies lurk around every civic bend dismantling our constitutional rights, it is with welcome relief that political commentator and one-time GOP strategist Kevin Phillips has stepped into the fray ... With great skill, Phillips illuminates how the Bush Dynasty has long used such old-boy organizations as Yale's Skull and Bones, the CIA, Dillon Read, and most recently the Carlyle Group to further its main objective: political-economic power." --Mother Jones

"A must-read for anyone skeptical of President Bush and other members of the Texas clan..." --New York Daily News

"American Dynasty, written with the passion of a modern-day Tom Paine, recalls all too clearly the Founding Father's words, little more than 200 years later." --Seattle Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Adult Hc/Tr
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0143034316
• ISBN 13: 9780143034315
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416