Daddy, War, Bucks: Kevin Phillips revisits the sins of the Bush fathers.

• Author: Greenfield, Jeff
• Position: On Political Books

When Kevin Phillips appears on television, he is usually identified as a Republican strategist," a label about as useful as identifying Robert Novak as a "registered Democrat." Yes, Phillips first gained attention in 1969 when he authored The Emerging Republican Majority, a shrewdly prescient look at how traditional Democrats were migrating toward the GOP on a path shaped by patriotism, cultural values, and race. In the decades since, however, Phillips has moved so far away from his Republican roots--or as he might argue, the Republican Party has moved so far away from the values of genuinely free markets, meritocracy, and individual liberties--that he is clearly more comfortable on the port side of the ship of state.

His last book, Wealth and Dermocracy, was a modulated but unmistakable work of anger at what he saw as the accumulation of enormous unearned wealth at the top of an ever-narrowing pyramid that has left the average American facing economic vulnerability and political impotence. With American Dynasty, Phillips has put modulation aside; this is nothing less than an indictment of four generations of the Bush family, composed at a barely contained white heat. In Phillips's eyes, the Bushes represent the embodiment of a mortal danger to the American republic: "the advent of a Machiavelli-inclined dynasty ... [with] a dynastic heir whose unfortunate inheritance is privileged, covert, and globally embroiling."

That conclusion follows 330 pages of an argument that reaches back to the financial beginnings of Samuel P. Bush and George Herbert Walker, both of whom launched the Bushes on a path of huge financial gain, war profiteering, international entanglements, and--generation by generation--crony capitalism and political finagling. It is both the great strength and great weakness of the book that Phillips piles on so much detail that a dispassionate reader does not know whether to be dazzled by the argument or paralyzed by it. Here is Geoge Herbert "Walker at the helm of a great investment house headed by Averell Harriman; here is Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of presidents, weaving a web of power that reaches back to his Skull and Bones days--that Yale secret society plays a recurring role here--and forward to suspicious financial dealings with Nazi Germany and (possibly) work as an intelligence agent. Here is George Herbert Walker Bush, riding family connections to unearned business success and (possibly) covert intelligence...