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

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

基本信息·出版社：Viking Adult
·页码：416 页
·出版日期：2004年01月
·ISBN：0670032646
·International Standard Book Number：0670032646
·条形码：9780670032648
·EAN：9780670032648
·装帧：精装
·正文语种：英语

内容简介 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.
作者简介 Kevin Phillips has been a political and economic commentator for more than three decades. A former White House strategist, he is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times and NPR and writes for Harper?s and Time. His books include New York Times bestsellers, The Politics of Rich and Poor and Wealth and Democracy.
媒体推荐 Praise for Wealth and Democracy: ?As the Bush administration weighs its next moves again the ?axis of evil,? many will ponder Phillips?s warning.? (The Washington Post) Praise for Wealth and Democracy: ?A gritty tour of American history and American fortunes . . . Phillips sits in the Republican pew but has a hymnal all his own.? (Chicago Tribune)
编辑推荐 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: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, 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 maneuvering to obtain 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 have succeeded as thoroughly as the Bushes. Jefferson and Madison would be horrified, and according to Phillips, we should be too. --Silvana Tropea
专业书评 From Publishers Weekly

Political and economics commentator Phillips (The Politics of Rich and Poor, etc.) believes we are facing an ominous time: "As 2004 began, [a] Machiavellian moment was at hand. U.S. president George W. Bush... was a dynast whose family heritage included secrecy and calculated deception." Phillips perceives a dangerous, counterdemocratic trend toward dynasties in American politic-she cites the growing number of sons and wives of senators elected to the Senate as an example. Perhaps less convincingly, he compares the "restoration" of the Bushes to the White House after an absence of eight years to the royal restorations of the Stuarts in England in 1660 and the Bourbons in France in 1814. To underscore the dangers of inherited wealth and power, Phillips delineates a complex case involving a network of moneyed influence going back generations, as well as the Bushes' long-time canny involvement in oil and foreign policy (read: CIA) and, he says, bald-faced appeasement of the nativist/fundamentalist wing that, according to Phillips, is now "dangerously" dominating the GOP. Casting a critical eye at the entire Bush clan serves the useful function of consolidating a wealth of information, especially about forebears George Herbert Walker and Prescott Bush. Phillips's own status as a former Republican (now turned independent) boosts the force of his argument substantially. Not all readers will share Phillips's alarmist response to the Bush "dynasty," but his book offers an important historical context in which to understand the rise of George W.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

There are many Bush-bashing books out there, but this one is quite different. Ivins, Franken, and Conason, among others, have focused primarily on the current president's administration. This book, written by a former Republican strategist, is more wide ranging, more scholarly, and in many ways, more disturbing. Focusing on the last four generations of Bush men, Phillips brings the reader into the secretive upper echelon of the American power establishment, where connections are made in Ivy League clubs, and he shows how members of that old-boy network become the policymakers of the country. In the case of the Bushes, this resulted not only in money and power but also in links to the CIA, the energy industry, and the military-industrial complex--links that have shaped this country's national and foreign policy for decades. Phillips explains the Bushes' relationship with Enron and the House of Saud in eyebrow-raising detail and adds confirming information about troubling claims, including the notion that the Reagan-Bush ticket arranged that American captives would not be released from Iran until Reagan took office. One of Phillips' main points is the juxtaposition between the Bush family ascent and European aristocracies, but this discussion almost seems intrusive. Unfortunately, Phillips' source notes were not appended in the galley; it will be interesting to peruse them in the finished book, which will generate much debate in the coming months. Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
目录
CONTENTS

prefaceix

Introduction1

Part I: Family, Dynasty, and Restoration
Chapter 1: The Not-Quite-Royal Family15
Chapter 2: The Dynastization of America51
Chapter 3: The First American Restoration73

Part II: Crony Capitalism, Covert Operations, and Compassionate Conservatism
Chapter 4: Texanomics and Compassionate Conservatism111
Chapter 5: The Enron-Halliburton Administration149
Chapter 6: Armaments and Men: The Bush Dynasty and the National Security State178

Part III: Religion, Oil, Armaments, and War
Chapter 7: The American Presidency and the Rise of the Religious Right 211
Chapter 8: Indiana Bush and the Axis of Evil245
Chapter 9: The Wars of the Texas Succession278

Afterword: Machiavelli and the American Dynastic Moment320
acknowledgments333
appendix a: Armaments and the Walker-Bush Family, 1914?40335
appendix b: Deception, Dissimulation, and Disinformation343
notes349
index373

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文摘 PREFACE

This book has changed a lotóin length, indignation, and its hitherto unpublished informationósince I began writing it in December 2002. My original ambition was to identify and explain the Bush-related transformation of the U.S. presidency into an increasingly dynastic office, a change with profound consequences for the American Republic, given the factors of family bias, domestic special interests, and foreign grudges that the Bushes, father and son, brought into the White House.

Unfortunately, in examining two Bush presidencies and the familyís four-generation pursuit of national prominence and poweróand in doing so through a lens that highlighted elite associations, dynastic ambitions, and recurring financial and business practicesóI found a greater basis for dismay and disillusionment than I had imagined. The result is an unusual and unflattering portrait of a great family (great in power, not morality) that has built a base over the course of the twentieth century in the back corridors of the new military-industrial complex and in close association with the growing intelligence and national security establishments. In doing so, the Bushes have threaded their way through damning political, banking, and armanents scandals and, since the 1980s, controversies like the October Surprise, Iran-Contra, and Iraqgate imbroglios, which in another climate or a different time might have led to impeachment.

I am not talking about ordinary lack of business ethics or financial corruption. During the late twentieth century, several other presidents and their families displayed these shortcomings, and the public has become understandably blasè. Four generations of building toward dynasty, however, have infused the Bush familyís hunger for power and practices of crony capitalism with a moral arrogance and backstage disregard of the democratic and republican traditions of the U.S. government. As we will see, four generations of involvement with clan
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