George W. Bush, 41: A Portrait of My Father (New York: Crown, 2014), 304 pp., $28.00.

James Mann, George W. Bush (New York: Times Books, 2015), 208 pp., $25.00.

 

THE BUSH family is quite possibly the ideal political dynasty for an angrily populist age. The one aristocratic trait the Bushes sometimes exhibit, a kind of all-purpose cluelessness, contrasts pleasingly with the Snopes-like single-mindedness of so many twenty-first-century politicians: the Clintons (with their air of arriviste entitlement), the Pauls (père and fils burning alike with libertarian passions), Chris Christie (blustering self-aggrandizement). We got a fresh taste of the peculiar Bush antimagic last December, when Jeb Bush announced he will “actively explore the possibility” of running for president in 2016, gingerly picking up the torch his father and older brother each fumblingly cradled all the way to the Oval Office. Though bland and bromidic, Jeb’s statement worried conservatives. Rush Limbaugh warned of a fresh assault by the GOP “donor class” on salt-of-the-earth, “hayseed, hick pro-lifers,” while the policy analyst Henry Olsen cautioned in National Review that “a business-oriented Republican who seems to value bosses over workers” would antagonize the GOP base. They had a point. The Bushes do indeed have deep ancestral roots on Wall Street, which ceased to be a site of social conservatism sometime during the reign of the Baptist teetotaler John D. Rockefeller, “a money grubber plus a theologian,” as H. L. Mencken once described him. But Bush-style conservatism isn’t only about upholding the plutocracy. It’s about money as a lubricator of “free enterprise” in the varied forms Bushes themselves have pursued through the generations: banking, oil, real estate, baseball team owning. As this history has enriched the family, it has also broadened its political reach. Among the current field of presidential aspirants only Jeb Bush has enduring ties to campaign pros in Texas and Florida—both electoral gold mines, both part of the giant Bush domain—and at the same time can count on family friends to organize a fund-raiser in Greenwich, Connecticut.

If the Bushes seem unruffled by Tea Party opposition, perhaps it is because they have been fending off charges of elitism for many years. “They say I’m a patrician,” the elder George Bush told voters in the Iowa caucus in 1980. “I don’t even know what the word means. I’ll have to look it up.” (This from a Phi Beta Kappa Yale graduate who completed his studies in two and a half years.) A generation later, George W. Bush, a more natural campaigner, turned two presidential contests, the first against Al Gore, the second against John Kerry—both prep-school and Ivy League products like himself—into an Animal House fracas, with Bush cast as the togaed partier John Belushi and his opponents as the buttoned-down prigs.

Much of this involved pandering, of course. But pandering is an essential discipline of presidential campaigning, with its hazings and abasements to which the upper classes seemed uniquely suited, reared as they are in “the code of the athlete, of the tough boy . . . that curious mixture of striving, asceticism, and rigor,” as Saul Bellow wrote (in his novel Dangling Man) in 1944—a year after the eighteen-year-old George H. W. Bush had become the navy’s youngest pilot.

But programmatic ordinariness exacts a cost. The “first” families of an earlier time cultivated an air of superiority: the Adamses, with their intellectual and literary gifts; the Roosevelts, with their ebullient noblesse; the Kennedys, with their tragic glamour and conquest of diverse milieus, from Boston to Hollywood. The Bushes make no such appeal to the imagination. It is not easy to picture the Ken Burns miniseries about them, unless it emphasized the wives—the sharp-tongued Barbara, the dreamily sensitive Laura. At age ninety, Bush 41 seems less the honored statesman than an amiable great-grandfather. And he bears the stigma still of repudiation, one of only two presidents elected since 1968 (the other was Jimmy Carter) who was denied a second term; the incumbent Bush got a smaller percentage of the vote in 1992 than Herbert Hoover did in 1932. George W. Bush slipped through to a second term, but he needed help from Supreme Court conservatives to get there in 2000; Gore received roughly 540,000 votes more than he did. And he returned to private life trailing more bad feeling than any departing president since Richard Nixon.

 

GEORGE W. Bush’s post-presidency has been attractively old-fashioned. He has withdrawn from the public stage in the way statesmen did a century ago. Critics find his paintings interesting. And his new memoir, 41: A Portrait of My Father, with its repeated references to “public service” and its muffling of ideological fervor, has an almost courtly traditionalism. Its central theme is the parallels that unite the two Bush presidencies, especially on the topic of war. Time and again, Bush 43 quotes examples of his father’s anguish at sending troops into battle, though that anguish is oddly self-referential. “I’m thinking about the kids, those young 19 year olds who will be dropped in tonight,” Bush Sr. wrote just before he decided to invade Panama in December 1989. The action involved some twenty thousand troops, making it, as the son notes, “the largest deployment since the Vietnam War.” It was also, he says, a “secret mission”—meaning his father did not consult Congress, the United Nations or the Organization of American States before deciding to act. At the time there was little protest, because the body count was tolerable: twenty-three Americans killed, three hundred wounded. “On New Year’s Eve, Mother and Dad visited a military hospital in San Antonio, where some of the wounded from Panama had been sent for treatment,” the younger Bush writes.

But Bush 43, like his father, remains silent about Panamanian casualties, whose number remains unknown. Intense fighting, followed by major fires, had occurred in the poor, densely populated slum around Manuel Noriega’s headquarters. In a story published just after the war, the New York Times reported that Red Cross workers had been “struggling for days to correlate names of missing civilians with bodies.” The Bushes leave this part of the story unsaid. The schoolboy code, as Bellow pointed out, “does admit of a limited kind of candor, a closemouthed straightforwardness. But on the truest candor, it has an inhibitory effect.”

The ousting of Noriega, in any case, was only the rehearsal for a strike against a bigger despot, Saddam Hussein, another former asset initially built up as a useful strongman (in this case as a check against Iran) until his ambitions in the region collided with ours. January 2015 marked the twenty-fourth year since Apache air strikes opened the war, which initiated the Bush family’s most enduring legacy, its father-and-son belligerency in the Persian Gulf. This episode too provided an occasion for limited candor. In a letter to his children, before Operation Desert Storm, Bush 41 wrote, “I guess what I want you to know as a father is this: Every human life is precious. When the question is asked ‘How many lives are you willing to sacrifice’—it tears at my heart. The answer of course, is none—none at all.”

The Iraqi death count also remains unknown, though one diligent researcher, the social scientist Beth Osborne Daponte, puts the total at more than 150,000, including those massacred in Shia and Kurdish uprisings, which, in the aftermath of Saddam’s defeat, were encouraged by Bush’s war team. Part II of the invasion, ordered by Bush 43 in 2003, would cause four hundred thousand or more Iraqi “excess deaths”—including pregnant women who couldn’t get to hospitals and civilians who drank contaminated water amid the brutal insurgencies. At the peak level of violence, before the daring and well-executed surge, an average of 1,629 Iraqi civilians were killed each month, as James Mann notes in George W. Bush, his concise new biography, an entry in the American Presidents book series. Mann, who has written impressively on Bush’s foreign policy, briskly reviews the Iraq disaster, “a strategic blunder of epic proportions, among the most serious in modern American history.” The failure is all the more dismaying for coming after sixteen months “of planning and preparation,” as Mann reminds us.

The trouble was “a series of faulty assumptions” that Bush’s war cabinet aggressively promulgated. One was that regime change in Iraq would bring stability to the region; another, that Iraq had a direct connection to the 9/11 attacks. Bush administration hawks ignored all warnings that the Iraq invasion would inflame an already-volatile region, summoning forth fresh waves of jihadists. The martial dogma they embraced struck many as new. In fact, it was an offshoot of the rollback or “liberationist” doctrine espoused by militant anti-Communists in the 1950s and 1960s. At the time, this approach was rejected as irresponsible by Democratic and Republican presidents alike. But it flourished on the right. Its first major political spokesman was Barry Goldwater. “In addition to keeping the free world free, we must try to make the Communist world free,” he declared in The Conscience of a Conservative. “To these ends, we must always try to engage the enemy at times and places, and with weapons, of our own choosing.” This crusading foreign policy was later taken up by neoconservatives in Bush 43’s administration and at outposts like the Defense Policy Board and the Weekly Standard. Together, they created the Bush Doctrine, which was Goldwaterism revived. “Deterrence, the promise of massive retaliation against nations, means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend,” George W. Bush said at West Point in June 2002. “Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies. . . . We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge.”

The result was calamitous: a unilateralist foreign policy that “opened what became a chasm between the United States and its European allies,” Mann writes. At home, it led to diminished civil liberties and a degraded rule of law.

 

ALL THIS history underlies 41 and its attempt to depict the son as the compass-true heir to his father. Bush 43 emphasizes his filial devotions, including his role as “loyalty enforcer” during his father’s 1988 presidential campaign. It was “Junior” who said to the operative Lee Atwater, “How do we know we can trust you?” Jeb, even blunter, told him, “If someone throws a grenade at our dad, we expect you to jump on it.” Atwater’s actual task was not to fall on grenades but to toss them at Michael Dukakis. Atwater’s friend Karl Rove later duplicated the no-prisoners strategy for George W. in 2004, when he targeted liberal critics of the Iraq War and got evangelicals to the polls to vote for state bans on gay marriage.

Rove, like Atwater before him, was prized for his loyalty, the single highest value for the Bushes, and not only at campaign time. “Loyalty, Republicans seemed to agree, was for Bush what ideology had been for Reagan,” Herbert Parmet observed in Lone Star Yankee, his biography of George H. W. Bush. It was for Bush 43 too. “Instead of replacing those in his administration who had become a clear liability, Bush consulted his own loyalty . . . and kept the loyalists on board,” Robert Draper wrote in Dead Certain, his account of the younger Bush’s presidency. The less loyal, like Colin Powell, were sidelined, or, like the economist Lawrence Lindsay, who dared to warn that the Iraq invasion might come at a steep economic cost, were harried from office. George W. Bush saves his most emphatic statement about loyalty for the end of his book:

When I was considering options for my vice presidential nominee, I called to ask [Bush Sr.’s] advice about his former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. Without hesitating, he said, “Dick would be a great choice. He would give you candid and solid advice. And you’d never have to worry about him going behind your back.”

Loyalty mattered to the family so greatly, in part, because its political dynasty was nourished in the alien soil of the Southwest, far from its natural East Coast habitat. We forget just how entrenched the Bushes are in the American establishment—more than the Kennedys, nearly equal to the Roosevelts. Samuel P. Bush, great-grandfather to George W. and Jeb, “was a steel and railroad executive who became the first president of the United States Chamber of Commerce,” John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge wrote in The Right Nation. The other great-grandfather, George Herbert Walker, was “the co-founder of W. A. Harriman, Wall Street’s oldest private investment bank. Walker’s stature was summed up by his twin Manhattan addresses: his office at One Wall Street and his home at One Sutton Place.” Next was Prescott Bush, who in the boom period of the 1920s married a Walker daughter, Dorothy, and joined the Harriman firm. Elected to the Senate in 1952, he became a model Eisenhower Republican.

Historically, the first families throve within the tight orbit of the old northeastern politics: the Adamses and Kennedys in Boston; the Roosevelts in Manhattan and Albany. But by the middle decades of the twentieth century that world was growing stale. Prescott Bush’s son George H. W. Bush sensed this, ahead of many others. So often mocked—for a time he joined in the laughter—for lacking “the vision thing,” he achieved one master visionary stroke, when he left behind the stock exchange and exurban Greenwich for the go-getting arcadia of West Texas. “By driving his red Studebaker away from the opportunities waiting on Wall Street,” Bush 43 writes, his father “defied convention, took a risk, and followed his independent instincts.” But he maintained strong ties back home. When he was ready to start his own oil company, in 1951, “Dad frequently traveled to the East Coast to look for money,” Bush writes:

Several of the company’s first major backers were family members or friends, including his father and his uncle George Herbert Walker, Jr., who was eager to take a bet on his favorite nephew. He also raised money from people like Eugene Meyer, then the President of the Washington Post newspaper corporation.

A year later, when Bush’s partner left the firm, “once again, my father turned to his Uncle Herbie and his Wall Street friends. . . . He lined up a half million dollars in capital.”

Bush’s East Coast pedigree set him apart from other Sun Belt figures when he decided to enter politics after moving from Midland, Texas, to the flush Houston “oil patch” in 1959. At the time the city was a hotbed of extremism, “one of the major strongholds” of the John Birch Society, as Parmet writes. The local chapter had only fifteen members in 1961, but Robert Welch, the Birch founder and leader, singled out

Los Angeles and Houston as his two strongest cities, which was not surprising given that the volatile climate of the latter also made it home to other such fringe groups as the Christian Crusade, the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, Freedom in Action, and such extremists also controlled the Committee for Sound American Education, which dominated Houston’s school board throughout the decade.

In 1962, Bush was recruited to become the GOP county chairman, on the assumption that as the son of Prescott Bush, the Connecticut senator who had criticized Joe McCarthy, he would chase out the kooks. Instead he courted them because, as he later said, “We all shared basic conservative views.” At the time, those views were segregationist. In his first campaign, for the Senate in 1964, Bush denounced the Civil Rights Act, just as Barry Goldwater did. Bush lost—to the Democratic incumbent, Ralph Yarborough, who had supported the legislation—but he was now an early favorite of National Review. It was only later, when the party base shifted to the center in reaction to Goldwater’s defeat and the initial enthusiasm for the Great Society, that Bush moved too. This is why some, including Parmet and the historian Timothy Naftali, say Bush is best understood not as a belated version of old-school GOP moderation but as an artificer of the new party, a comrade in arms of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

 

HIS FIRST patron was Nixon, whose journey was the reverse of Bush’s—from Orange County to the East and into the heart of the GOP establishment, still based in New York, when Nixon entered politics in the 1940s. Nixon, too, was a bridging figure. And his patronage was crucial to Bush, who was being held back by Texas’s still-dominant Democratic Party. He was elected twice to the House, but the victories were bracketed by two failed Senate campaigns, first in 1964 and then again in 1970. Under normal circumstances his career would have been finished, but party chieftains liked him. “Nixon rescued Bush’s political career from the scrap heap,” Quinn Hillyer wrote in National Review last year:

First Nixon appointed Bush to be ambassador to the United Nations (the Washington Star wrote that Bush’s appointment represented a “major downgrading” of the position), then sent him to head the RNC, and later let it be known he thought Bush might be vice-presidential material when Nixon left office. The simple reality is that people who serve just two terms in the House and then lose Senate races do not usually end up with a series of high-level executive appointments. Without Nixon’s sponsorship, Bush surely would not have been within sniffing distance of a presidential run in 1980, and the vice presidency under Reagan would have been a pipe dream.

Bush 43 similarly discusses his father’s early career in deflating terms. “None of the jobs he had held in the 1970s were viewed as a springboard to political success,” he writes. “Not only is my father the only President to have held all four of those jobs [ambassador to the United Nations, Republican Party chairman, liaison officer in China and director of the CIA], he is the only president to have held any of those four jobs.” The reason is that each was essentially a patronage reward, given to a trusted insider and proven loyalist. Bush was the consummate “good soldier,” as Parmet writes. Watergate put his loyalty to the test. He made every extenuation he could, but was disillusioned by the White House tapes. While others were disturbed by Nixon’s rants against his many “enemies,” real and imagined, Bush was shocked, his son reports, by “the harsh and amoral way in which [Nixon] spoke about his supposed friends.” He adds, “One of the supposed friends was George Bush. Nixon had called Dad a ‘worrywart’ and complained that he hadn’t used the RNC aggressively enough to defend him.” Given the full range of Nixonian insult, this seems rather mild. But the code of loyalty is strict, and extends up as well as down.

After Nixon resigned, in August 1974, Gerald Ford, an accidental president looking to replace himself with an accidental vice president, whittled his list down to two, Bush and Nelson Rockefeller. Rockefeller was far better known, but Bush was sixteen years younger and much more palatable to the GOP base. He “was on the list partly because an RNC poll of party leaders showed that Dad had more support than anyone else,” Bush 43 writes. What he doesn’t say is that his father lobbied strenuously for the job. According to Parmet, Bush’s candidacy “was the most concerted and best organized.” It was, in the event, the ultimate appointive job and might plausibly lead to the presidency—the best option Bush could hope for, after his losing campaigns. Some thought he was damaged goods. Nixon, for one, had been convinced Bush lacked the killer instinct after Bush declined to spend money funneled through Nixon’s “Townhouse” operation for attack ads in his second Senate race, against Lloyd Bentsen in 1970. That money undid Bush, when its trail emerged during the Watergate investigations. Most of it had been sent to him legally. But $40,000, wired directly to an ad agency and not to campaign headquarters, had been left out of the required disclosure reports.

It was a petty infraction, but Bush now bore the Watergate taint, and Ford chose Rockefeller. Bush got a consolation prize: Ford made him director of the CIA—another job for a good soldier, especially since the agency was then in need of a clean-bristled “broom” after House and Senate committees uncovered a long train of intelligence abuses. The crusading liberal Senator Frank Church, who led the Senate investigation, objected to Bush’s appointment, saying he was too political. Bush got through the confirmation hearings, and as CIA director restored morale in part by attacking leakers like Philip Agee. He offered to stay in the job under the next president, Jimmy Carter, but was replaced. Bush’s career looked to be over. It wasn’t. Instead he challenged Ronald Reagan in 1980—as brazen an act as any Democrat’s challenging Hillary Clinton is likely to seem in 2016.

An exultant Bush, riding the crest of “Big Mo,” upset Reagan in Iowa and won a few more primaries—a testament to his energy and resourcefulness, and to his talent for positioning. His singular East Coast/Sun Belt identity made him a kind of GOP gyroscope, a precision-tooled seeker of respectable positions. Although he lacked Reagan’s political gifts, he zeroed in on Reagan’s weaknesses. His “voodoo economics” remains the wittiest epithet for Reagan’s supply-side credo, and although Bush would spend long years living it down, it did its job at the time, reinforcing the suspicion that Reagan might be an extremist simpleton and so helped secure Bush’s place on the ticket, as a ballast. Once invited in, Bush transferred his loyalty to Reagan, and when at last the nomination was his in 1988, he made sure, with Atwater’s help, not to repeat the tepid nice-guy-ism of his previous elections.

 

TODAY THE elder Bush’s presidency has profited from revisionism. (Barack Obama is an admirer.) Bush’s refusal to march to Baghdad was a model of restraint compared to what came later. But it was the denouement of the Cold War that brought out the best in Bush. Conservative mythology gives all the credit to Reagan, because of his thunderous rhetoric and his combination of diplomatic overtures and increased military spending. But Bush was president in the annus mirabilis of 1989—when the Berlin Wall fell, when the Velvet Revolution climaxed in Eastern Europe and when student protesters gathered in Tiananmen Square—all pulse points in the “end of history” described by Francis Fukuyama in The National Interest. Bush’s confident stewardship contrasts strikingly with the crusading of his son and discredits the claim that the two presidencies were ideologically of a piece.

It is true that the key players were often the same: the belligerents Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, the pragmatists Powell and Condoleezza Rice. What differed was the distribution of power and influence. Bush 41 knew whom to listen to and when. Bush 43, though a skilled reader of other people in most circumstances, was utterly thrown off course by 9/11. In his hands, the gyroscope wobbled, the center didn’t hold. As interagency differences threatened to divide his administration, he fell back on the one political principle he really understood, loyalty, and elevated it into an ideology all its own, articulated most succinctly on September 20, 2001, in his televised speech to a joint session of Congress: “Every nation in every region now has a decision to make,” Bush said. “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” Out of this stark dichotomy came the Iraq War. Bush 43, who had come into office with bold ideas on education and immigration, thus became the third modern example of a “legislative president” destroyed by his mismanagement of a war. The previous two—Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon B. Johnson—at least had the excuse that the wars found them.

Only George W. Bush had gone in search of a foreign monster. Also, unlike Wilson and LBJ, Bush had a meager domestic record. Mann, as tough as he is on Bush’s foreign policy, is equally unsparing on Bush’s failures at home, beginning with the giant tax cuts he pushed through even as he spent lavishly on domestic programs and created a new prescription-drug benefit. All this depleted the surplus he had inherited from Bill Clinton and created a second chasm, in this case between the “1 percent” and everyone else, with disparities not seen since the Gilded Age. Not all this was Bush’s fault. The reckless deregulating started with his predecessors, including Clinton. And Bush’s talk of an “ownership society” was in keeping with the dot-com and real-estate bubbles, and the rise of “personal investors” lured by climbing stock prices. But as the financial crisis worsened, Bush was slow to react, in part because his authority had been undermined by his failures in Iraq, along with his confused response to Hurricane Katrina. The “capital” he boasted he would spend after his reelection, a legitimate win, instead petered out; his repudiation was sealed by the Democrats’ sweeping victories in 2006 and 2008.

 

WHICH LEADS, inevitably, to the latest Bush aspirant and his prospects. Will Jeb prove to be 41’s son or 43’s brother? His résumé is more like his father’s, though on the surface, George W. seems the closer copy: the elite boarding school, Yale—and then, topping Dad, Harvard Business School. But in adhering so closely, George W. skipped the risk-and-adventure stage. He only flirted with rebellion, while Jeb showed true independence, bypassing Yale for the University of Texas (and getting his degree in two and a half years, like his father) and then spending two years in Caracas, as the branch officer of a bank, before going to Florida to help with his father’s presidential campaign in 1980. Settling there—and getting into real estate, instead of oil like his father and his brother—signaled the next phase of the Bush family’s political homesteading.

And there is the question of Jeb’s ideological conviction. Like his father and brother, he has combined various strands of conservatism and emphasized different ones at different times. Limbaugh is right that Jeb’s positions on immigration and Common Core are liabilities at a moment when the GOP base has grown impatient with Beltway leaders too willing to negotiate with Obama after the party’s sweeping midterm victory. Jeb, too, seems conciliatory or at least circumspect. But if the economy continues to improve, Obama could leave office as a relatively popular president, as Clinton did in 2000, despite having been impeached. George W. Bush, grasping this, “cunningly presented himself as Bill Clinton’s heir,” as David Frum wrote in 2008. Jeb is better positioned than most other Republicans to do the same in 2016.

A few years ago, the prospect of a third Bush in the White House would have alarmed Republicans as well as Democrats, but that was before the dismal spectacle of 2012. Jeb’s announcement, whatever it leads to, has already spared the GOP a third Mitt Romney campaign. Nevertheless, it is true that Jeb risks being depicted as Romney redux, palatable to Democrats and independents but anathema to his own party. But unlike Romney, Jeb can point to his earlier “head-banging” self, who first ran for governor (and lost) in 1994, the year that Newt Gingrich and other Southern Republicans captured the House, climaxing an intraparty insurgency Gingrich had begun to mount in 1990, when its target was . . . George H. W. Bush, who had compromised with Democrats on a budget. George W. Bush presented himself as both his father’s son and his opposite. Jeb may be able to do something similar—present himself as both the next Bush and the new, improved Bush. These adjustments are normal in the special world of dynastic politics. Franklin Roosevelt idolized his cousin Theodore but was also the ideological heir of TR’s progressive adversary Woodrow Wilson. John F. Kennedy spent much of his early career detaching himself from his father’s tarnished legacy as an accused Nazi “appeaser” even as Joseph Kennedy was grooming him for the presidency.

In the end, Jeb will make his case on his two terms in Florida. As Texas had been fertile ground for the GOP’s midcentury alignment, so Florida, diverse and “purple,” has emerged as a crucial piece in the party’s new electoral map and the staging ground of a new conservative politics, via, for one, Jeb’s protégé Marco Rubio, who may contest Jeb and seems to enjoy the support of “reformicons” such as David Brooks, Ross Douthat and Ramesh Ponnuru. But before he challenges Jeb, Rubio will do well to study Jeb’s role in the Florida recount in 2000. What most remember is his chagrin at not being able to deliver the state outright to his brother. But Jeb used the governorship effectively during the postelection battle. “Nothing was more valuable to [George W.] Bush in the first key days of the deadlock than his brother’s [Jeb’s] power and network of resources—especially his staff of politically expert lawyers,” according to Deadlock, the account written by the Washington Post’s political reporters. “Jeb Bush had, in his general counsel’s office, some of the sharpest, freshest lawyer-politicians in Florida. They knew the law, the players, the terrain and where the bodies were buried in a way that the Democrats streaming in from Nashville [where Gore’s campaign was located] could never match.”

It was an incalculable advantage, even if Jeb formally recused himself; the essential lawyers all took temporary leaves of absence, to avoid the appearance of conflict. “Family loyalties pulled him one way—but that way threatened severe damage to his own political future,” the Post reporters say. “If his brother won, half the voters in his state would be angry. A good number of them would suspect that Jeb personally arranged it.” But for the Bushes, loyalty comes first. And like all dynastic families, they equate what is best for themselves with what is best for the country. This is the meaning of “public service.” For genial, well-adjusted Bushes, no less than for the “harsh, amoral” Nixon, the world divides neatly into two camps. The rest of us, too, may soon have a decision to make.

Sam Tanenhaus is writing a biography of William F. Buckley Jr.

Image: George W. Bush presidential library