An important key to the Bush dynasty's political power, in Phillips's view, lies in the family's connections to the CIA. He goes so far as to assert that the CIA put George H.W. (the agency's former director) and his son in power. It's true that CIA employees and alumni backed George H.W.'s presidential ambitions, but I think Phillips goes too far in saying that they actually placed him--or his son--in office. Phillips's conspiracy theories about the CIA suggest that the agency's connection with the Bush family began with Prescott Bush, a handsome, undistinguished senator from Connecticut. (Phillips also states that Prescott was the first family member to harbor presidential ambitions.)

In making his case about the enormous power of the CIA, earlier and now, Phillips exaggerates its current power. Under George W. Bush, the CIA has become a weak cog in the Administration's foreign policy machinery. True, Bush appears to like (or at least he used to) CIA Director George Tenet--a smart, wily and entertaining man who has cultivated George W., even naming the CIA building after the President's father. (George W., for his part, tried to cultivate Edward Kennedy by, among other things, naming the Justice Department building after Robert F. Kennedy. The Kennedy courtship succeeded in getting Kennedy to back the No Child Left Behind education bill of 2001, a vote he later came to regret.) Tenet does see Bush nearly every day for the President's morning intelligence briefing and is in many meetings with Bush and/or his top foreign policy advisers. As the late George Ball, Under Secretary of State in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and an opponent of the Vietnam War, once said, "Nothing propinques like propinquity."

But the CIA has been severely weakened by the current Bush Administration. After all, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld set up his own intelligence unit to give him information about Iraq that would help build the case for war. The CIA's warnings that Iraq had not made as much progress on acquiring nuclear weapons as the Administration claimed, and that Iraq had no significant ties to Al Qaeda, another Administration justification for war, were ignored. Moreover, Tenet was assigned, and accepted, the blame for Bush's mistaken assertion in his 2002 State of the Union address that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa"--though he was only partly at fault. The White House insists that Tenet didn't read the drafts of that speech, though apparently one of his underlings did, and negotiated with the President's aides the wording the President used. The true origin of that line is among the many mysteries of the Bush Administration.

Then there was the Administration's meanspirited and perhaps criminal blowing of the cover of CIA agent Valerie Plame after her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, publicly disputed the Administration's claim that Saddam tried to import yellowcake from Niger. As it happens, Dick Cheney had been going to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia--a most unusual act for a Vice President--and reportedly leaning on officials to, among other things, validate the yellowcake assertion. The blowing of Plame's cover, of course, also gravely damaged the CIA. These particular events may have occurred after Phillips drafted his book, but other incidents that point to the CIA's current weakness had indeed occurred in time for Phillips to take note of them.

As for George W. Bush's brutal approach to politics, Phillips's recounting of the Bush campaign in 2000 oddly fails to mention the ugly smear effort it waged against John McCain in South Carolina. Phillips does write tellingly of Al Gore's egregious miscalculations in Florida in 2000. That both Gore and Bush ended up needing Florida so badly is a reflection of the fact that both ran bad campaigns, and both made big mistakes. That Gore got a majority of the popular vote is irrelevant, and he must know that, even if he can't admit it.

Of course, the Bush campaign, ably aided by former Secretary of State James Baker and the Supreme Court, did pull off a coup d'état in Florida. Moreover, Bush's 2000 campaign was one of the most deceptive in American history. (It far surpassed FDR's 1932 promise to balance the budget.) Bush managed to fool enough people--and most journalists--into thinking he would govern as a moderate or "compassionate" conservative. (After the nomination was in hand, he posed with little black children, much as Richard Nixon posed with his friend Sammy Davis Jr.)

One of the great values of Phillips's book is the light it sheds on the current Administration's policies--its radical anti-environmental, pro-energy-company, pro-business policies. Much of this has been attributed to Dick Cheney and his Halliburton connection, but Bush himself has had a large--perhaps the dominating--hand in these policies. In his 2000 presidential campaign Bush shed precious little light on his intentions in these policy areas. So in this respect, as well as on the war in Iraq, the American people were lied to.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.