The Grand Old Party: An Intimate Autopsy of how Paranoia, Prejudice, and Criminal Conspiracy Corroded American Democracy, One Year at a Time
Part Four: No New Taxes, But of Course There Were
Note: This is part four of five articles examining the National Republican Party from Nixon to Trump and how lies, cheating, bullying and racism became the favorite tools of the GOP.
George Herbert Walker Bush was born into the kind of American aristocracy where failure simply wasn’t part of the vocabulary—his father Prescott a Wall Street titan turned U.S. Senator, the family’s Greenwich estate the sort of place where power was inherited like the family silver. But young George, the genuine war hero who enlisted on his 18th birthday and became the Navy’s youngest aviator, shot down over the Pacific and plucked from the ocean by a submarine, seemed determined to prove he’d earned his own way. After Yale and Skull and Bones—because of course there was Skull and Bones—he decamped for the oil fields of West Texas in 1948, trading his Connecticut patrimony for the dusty plains of Midland, making his fortune with Zapata Petroleum and positioning himself as a self-made man, though the family connections that financed his ventures told a more complicated story.
His résumé reads like a guided tour through the corridors of American power: congressman from Texas in 1966, ambassador to the United Nations under Nixon, chairman of the Republican National Committee during Watergate, envoy to China, and then—the capstone of his pre-presidential career—Director of Central Intelligence from 1976 to 1977, tasked with restoring the CIA’s battered reputation after Vietnam and Watergate. By the time Reagan tapped him as vice president in 1980, Bush had accumulated more high-level government experience than virtually anyone who’d ever sought the presidency. He’d been everywhere, done everything, knew everyone. And therein lay both his strength and his fatal weakness: he was the ultimate insider in an era increasingly hostile to insiders, a man whose entire identity was bound up in duty and service to institutions that millions of Americans had come to distrust.
