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The Family
The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty
Kitty Kelly
Doubleday

Kitty Kelly, queen of the best-selling exposés of the rich and famous has produced another look at how wealth and power can corrupt. This time her subject is the Bush dynasty – a word they disdain for its elitist connotations. However, if she it to be believed — and why shouldn’t she be when she had many lawyers scrutinize the information in this book prior to publication and has never successfully been sued by any party about whom she has written – the Bush family has spent the last three generations developing a political lineage of dynastic proportions.

The story of this family reads like a Taylor Caldwell, or even a Harold Robbins, novel. One young man makes a mint during the same industrial era that created the Rockefeller fortune, and that money is passed down to and grown by each subsequent generation, which uses it as a power platform to gain every greater amounts of influence. In this case, that young moneymaker was George Herbert Walker, whose daughter married Prescott Bush and began the family Americans have come to love or loathe.

What is of particular interest in this tale, is that though it is clear that every generation of Bushes has benefited from their family’s money and connections to groups like Skull and Bones at Yale University – and later to the CIA and the oval office – each and everyone of the sons of the house of Bush insists that they are self-made men. Kelly exhaustively and convincingly documents how each of the Bushes has been handed the silver spoons that they have used to feed themselves ever-bigger portions of the American pie, while remaining self-deluded about their actual paltry contributions to their own successes.

What emerges is a portrait of publicly personable, glad-handing people who are simultaneously private liars and back stabbers. They are much like the guy in your office who plays golf with the higher ups and manages to get promoted while taking credit for all your work while destroying you, your credibility and your prospects on the way up.

She also exposes a few closely guarded family secrets along the way. For instance, in her book, Sharon — the former wife of Neil Bush, brother of the current president and son of the former president — claims that George W. Bush used cocaine at Camp David while his father was in office. This contradicts G. W.’s time frame of recovery from substance abuse and has him using drugs during the time he claims to have been “born again.” Kelly recounts numerous anecdotes about the vitriolic outpourings of former First Lady, Barbara Bush. Known publicly as a nice, old grandma, she was in reality, a vicious old bitch. Kelly is not the first to mention the deficits in Barbara Bush’s personality, but she is the first to mention that Barbara’s husband had a long-term affair with his secretary. No wonder Babs was on the rag.

Though a good deal of the information in this book comes from unnamed sources, much of it seems highly credible. Certainly the information about George H. W. Bush’s affair appears to have been widely known by Washington insiders for many years prior to Kelly’s revelations. The accusations that Laura Bush sold dime bags of pot during college, and that George W. and Governor Jeb Bush had affairs while married is not so well substantiated. But nothing the author claims seems out of place with this family once she has set up the foundation of their story. In fact, each revelation of imperfection makes sense as part of her psychological profile.

Kelly’s prose is straightforward and very readable. She invokes the era of the founders of the Bush family with flair and she, mostly, avoids editorializing. That Kelly is not in love with the Bushes is clear, and yet she describes their personal heartaches and trials with the kind of compassion Barbara only showed to her dog, Millie.

If one desires a look at the kind of life most will never lead, because power and wealth have created an uneven playing field, then The Family will be as illuminating, as it is bile-producing.

Rating:

Fanatics and Fools
The Game Plan for Winning Back America
Arianna Huffington
Miramax Books

At the risk of seeming one note — like one of the kids in the Sound of Music who learns to sing by endlessly braying out a single ti or do, while bounding across the Austrian countryside wearing a floral-printed smock made from discarded curtains, until she gets it right — I am here to report on yet, another election year, anti-George Bush tome. And this time I am going to get it right. Really.

Has any sitting president in recent memory inspired such an outpouring of published pique? (Okay, maybe Bill Clinton.) Even in an era when most people, allegedly, don’t read much, many of these hate-the Republican-sin and hate-the-Republican-sinner books are bestsellers holding onto slots on the New York Times’ list for months at a time.

For myself, I’ve just about had it with the bad news. These days, I’d rather read fiction or stories about animals. I had to cancel my e-mail membership to Move-On.org because I couldn’t take their daily fear mongering anymore. If I didn’t admire Arianna Huffington’s way with words, or hadn’t (absentee) voted for her for Governor of California, or hadn’t gotten her book for free and autographed to me, I may have skipped Fanatics and Fools and picked up Seabiscuit, instead. Sorry Laura Hidebrand, I still haven’t read your book, but if it makes you feel any better I did see the movie. I’m sure it’s the same thing, right?

In any case, if one to were to read a single book about why George Bush and his cronies must go away, and do so as rapidly as possible, then Fanatics and Fools would be an excellent choice. Arianna is a better writer — and funnier — than Al Franken. She hasn’t worn out her welcome quite as much as has Michael Moore. Plus, she needs the revenue to prove that she does, indeed, pay income taxes. More importantly, rather than being just another enumeration of the sitting president’s flaws, Arianna’s book serves up a little vision with the vitriol.

I’m going out on a stylistic limb here by calling her by her first name only. After all, there is only one Arianna (like there is only one Madonna or Cher). Plus, I believe the kind of folksy but smart warmth she tries to convey— not to mention her tireless self-promotion — compels me to call her by her given name. Now that I recheck, I see that the inscription in my book is signed with the single name, so I feel a bit better about my choice to go with the familiar terminology.

Anyhoo, what Arianna does in this book is lay out a litany of the lies and manipulations of the Bush administration. She presents the case for viewing the neo-conservatives as a group who are making a disaster of America's domestic and foreign policies. First she tackles the, by now thoroughly invalidated, reasons put forth by the Bush Administration’s “fanatics” to go to war in Iraq and the disastrous aftermath of said war. Then she rips the facade from “compassionate conservatism” by exposing the hypocrisy inherent in aspects of the Republican agenda like Bush’s Orwellian-monikered programs. “No Child Left Behind, “ is one optimistically misnamed program that upon closer inspection leaves many children behind in the public school system. Another, the “Blue Skies Initiative,” pulls the plug on environmental regulations and sullies the air at a faster rate than J-Lo goes through husbands.

Arianna also describes her abortive run for governor of California. A sarcastic and biting critic throughout, she reserves an especially sharpened dagger to plunge into former and future opponent, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s heart. He deserves it when, after running on the “compassionate conservative” platform, “he didn’t even wait a few weeks before targeting programs [for financial cuts] benefiting the poor and disadvantaged.” These programs included all public schools from K-12 institutions to state colleges and universities, Medi-Cal from which she slashed nearly $900 million, capping enrollment in the Healthy Families program, cutting money from AIDS treatment and prevention, cutting $375 million from support services that help the elderly, and more. Much more. Yes, he deserves her relentless scrutiny, particularly now that he has his own stake in the company that owns the nation’s major tabloids (The Star, the Enquirer, the Weekly World News, plus the Weider Publications). It will take independents, like Arianna, to scrutinize him because some of the most reliably, no-holds-barred, expose writers in this country are decisively out of the running.

Enough about fanatics. How about the fools? In this section, Arianna explains why the Democrats are just about as bad —meaning corrupt and untrustworthy— as the Republicans. She says they benefit from the same corporate slush funds, they are toothless when it comes to pushing a remotely left of center agenda and they have become so spineless as to be almost unelectable. Though she has billed herself as an Independent for several years now – since her conversion from Newt Gingrich style, Republican hate mongering – she concedes that during this election it is important for people to forget what asses the Donkeys are in favor of remembering how dangerous the Pachyderms have been. She even pleads with Green party members, whom she seems to like and identify with, that they have to forego their deepest beliefs and do whatever it takes to oust George Bush. In other words, the Democrats are dead; long live the Democrats (at least in November of 2004).

In the last short section of the book Arianna gets to her “game plan.” Here Arianna lays out a list of ideas that she believes need to be implemented to change the nature of politics and leadership in America. After calling for the people of this country to change their innermost attitudes to long-held ideas like thinking that the most macho man should be president (Felix Unger for President instead!) and that family values are some kind of throwback to the dead-and-gone ideals of the ‘50s she lays out “The New Contract for a Better America.” In it she lists eight imperatives including, “Achieve Energy Independence,” Prescribe a Cure for the Healthcare Epidemic,” “Treat Lost Jobs as a Social Calamity, Not a Lagging Economic Indicator, and “Be a Leader, Not a Bully.”

While it seems important to constantly point out to those who don’t yet get it, that their government is corrupt and their leaders are lying to them, it is still a downer. No matter how wittily Arianna explains the facts of what’s the matter, my weariness of the topic suggests to me that it is time to stop the mudslinging and present a new vision. Though she does both in Fanatics and Fools, one hopes that her next book will concentrate on the “vision thing,” — something she eloquently and emotionally claims Robert Kennedy did in spades during his short political career — rather than the vitriol thing. If the country is to change its attitudes, someone, hopefully many someones, must be willing to keep shining a light on the progressive ideas that will move America forward to create a thriving, truly compassionate society. Arianna is half way there, and despite all that is shallow and self-serving about her and her work, that still puts her 50% closer to the goal than most of her rivals. Maybe if she can keep illuminating the ideal she will be Governor of California yet — if there’s anything left when Arnold is done.

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