Bush on American Experience

Part 1.
On PBS last week, the American Experience series on "the Presidents" did their bit on George Herbert Walker Bush, 41st President of the United States (1989-93). It was the very worst of PBS—shmaltz honoring a man who is infamous for his conscious efforts to debase our political culture to the benefit of his own family.

The whole two night piece cast Bush as a heroic figure, the sort of guy who easily fell into leadership because of his natural charm and superior talents. This may have been true for the schoolboy, but the man Bush more likely benefited from his pedigree.

The blue-chip Bush family was headed by George's father Prescott; industrialist, Wall St. banker and nazi regime investor. His dealings with Hitler's Germany were 86'd in 1942 by the Trading With the Enemy Act. Earlier that year, "On his eighteenth birthday, January 12, 1942," Tom Wicker writes, George "was sworn into the U.S. Navy, in a speedup program to train flyers. After earning his wings in less than a year, he became the youngest aviator in the navy."

Bush flew a lot of missions and was decorated, but his whole political career was about connections, not talents, and I can't help but wonder if his commission at 18 was not related to his father's social position and that dicey business with the nazis.

Bush became a successful oil man in Texas after the war. His son George W. followed that lead but was a "duster," a guy who couldn't strike oil. Was it luck that distinguished the two men, or talent? Maybe neither: oil is found by diligent scientific work, acquiring lands and rights and such. In the late 40s and early 50s, these components were possibly easier to assemble than in the late 70s, and the younger Bush's propensity for bungling everything is a matter of record indeed. But I believe that the elder Bush was able to assemble a successful business with good contacts because he had money and youth and the post-war might of "Wise Men" political culture. American Experience, though, glosses Bush's oil career as momentary good fortune that most importantly shaped his political ambitions.

These ambitions were portrayed by Producer and Writer Austin Hoyt as the forward motion of a family dedicated to national public service. This dedication was the hallmark of the economic lords Hoyt terms, "Wise Men." Generally, the careers of these stewards of American finacial culture include some time on Wall St. before grandly taking the reins of American public life. But the sage leadership Hoyt depicts cannot overcome basic contradictions in the record of men like the Bushes. Like, how is it wise and selfless public service to maintain investments in Nazi Germany for over two years after Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain? How is the interest of these men in running the government, thus the economy, congruent with running finance? Why is it selfless and wise to be in charge of everything, rather than selfless and wise to remain free of the burdens of power?

I have to think that it is banal ambition, borne of aristocratic superiority, that motivates these men to wealth; to pedigrees closed to common people; to control of the economic destinies of anonymous millions, and then control of the social destiny of the entire national community. These "Wise Men" are obliged to control the world: it's what they do. It's the tradition passed from monarchy to plutocracy.

Hoyt's and PBS's Bush is a man of pure grace who was about to enter a world of command that would challenge that grace. Through it all, according to this yarn, Bush's greatest struggles were ultimately those involving his inate nobility.

I am much less enamored of this monster. As a counterweight to Hoyt's teary praise, I feel the greatest challenge to Bush was to maintain his privileged footing in the tug between larger human forces and the fortunes of his family.