The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty

This is a long look into the Bush family dynasty. Turns out that before George H.W. (the 41st President) and George W. (the 43rd President), there is a long history of powerful people in the Bush clan.

The book starts back with Samuel Prescott Bush, in the 1800s. He was a powerful and wealthy industrialist. It spends a bit of time on him, but then launches into the three generations that it concentrates on:

• Prescott Bush, who was a wealthy businessman and two-term senator from Connecticut

• His son, George H.W. Bush, who moved to Texas in his 20s to build an oil company, then became a Congressman from Texas, head of the Republican National Committee, Ambassador to China, Director of the CIA, Vice-President under Ronald Reagan, and, finally, a one-term President.

• His grandson, George W. Bush, who continued his father’s oil interests, made a very timely and lucrative investment in the Texas Rangers baseball team, unsuccessfully ran for Congress twice, finally became governor of Texas for just six years, before becoming a two-term President.

These three generations are the core of the book. Along the way, there are sidetracks into some other people:

• James Bush, who was George H.W.'s ne’er-do-well brother, who died destitute in the Philippines after embezzling money from his employer
• Jeb Bush, George W’s younger brother, who was the governor of Florida (he unsuccessfully ran for President after the book was published)
• Neil Bush, George W’s other brother, who was heavily involved in a savings and loan scandal during that crisis
• Herbert Walker, Prescott’s brother-in-law (his wife’s brother) who provided a lot of the clan’s money, and was H.W.'s mentor

And then there are the wives:

• Prescott’s wife, Dorothy
• George H.W.'s wife, Barbara
• George W’s wife, Laura

The Bush wives have figured prominently in their respective families and the larger clan as a whole. For all the male posturing, there’s an undercurrent of matriarchal power that I enjoyed. The book spends a lot of time on Barbara, who it portrays as a horrible, bitter woman who was very sensitive about her appearance, particularly that she looked older than her husband. Contrast this to Laura who comes off as an exceedingly boring, agreeable woman who never did anything notable, good or bad, and neither seemed to try nor care to make a name for herself.

And this is where the book runs off the rails a bit – the author, Kitty Kelley, is known as a gossip-monger, and this book does nothing to dispel that image. She slings a lot of mud about personal relationships. She has clear opinions about people in the Bush clan, and she just hammers home those opinions again and again. It was hard to figure out what was true and what was over-emphasized. She has extensive notes, quotes, and citations, but I felt like she was cherry-picking anecdotes that served her purpose.

I’ll admit I was interested to learn about George H.W.'s philandering. He apparently had several girlfriends outside his marriage, along with an long-standing affair with his assistant in the 1970s. I’m prepared to believe this, because I did a little research, and it’s not just Kelley who has claimed it. Apparently it was a poorly kept secret that drove Barbara into a deep depression at one point.

Also interesting is that the Bush family is very much an upper crust, elite New England family. My generation largely knows them as down-home Texas oil barons, but their roots are in Connecticut (Prescott was a senator from there, and worked in the political background for decades). H.W. was born and raised there and only went to Texas to seek his fortune. Even W. was born in New Haven – his family went west after his birth.

(Related to that, Yale University is essentially another character in the book. Almost every Bush male went to Yale, and many were members of the Skull and Bones society. Yale is threaded very prominently throughout the Bush history.)

Kelley spends a lot of time towards the back half of the book just hammering home the (subjective) point that George W. is not very smart. He was a poor student at Yale (he has confirmed and often joked about this), and she has quotes from a lot of classmates who can’t believe he became president. George W. was quite the party-boy at Yale, and he developed significant substance abuse issues in the late 70s and early 80s (again, this is something he’s been very open about).

So, while the book was informative and gave me a lot of new information, the author comes off as petty and salacious. She wrote a long prologue about how the Bush’s tried to suppress the research and publication of the book to avoid having their secrets revealed, but I was struck by the fact that the Bush family has an … acceptable (?) number of secrets. When you consider how large and sprawling the family is, the number of business and political ventures they’ve been in, the number of natural enemies a family like that will create over time, and the constant microscope they lived under – honestly, their “skeletons” seem pretty expected and routine.

Contrary to how Kelley set it up, there are no huge bomb drops here. There’s a lot of petty gossip and family drama, but nothing (outside of H.W.'s womanizing, maybe) that shocked me in any way.