They met, with Cheney briefly present, something didn’t click, and Cheney got the job instead. The leading candidate for Bush’s Vice-President was said to be the former Senator John Danforth, of Missouri, a moderate Republican. He hardly ever said anything, so how could he have an agenda? of Halliburton, he was living in Texas at the time, rather than in Washington, and he projected a stolid, phlegmatic trustworthiness. Bush’s Vice-Presidential search committee, came highly recommended by Bush 41. Cheney, who at first served as the chairman of George W. Partly because he felt his father had not been well served by the independent political consultants he used in his unsuccessful reëlection campaign, he insisted that Karl Rove sell his consulting firm and work as a full-time campaign employee in 2000. Bush, in his pre-Presidential days, was even more preoccupied than his father with extirpating aides who, in his view, had their own agendas. “He just became very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with.” But Cheney, he told Meacham, had changed. The president should not have that worry.” Bush had never liked or trusted-or hired-Rumsfeld, so in his case the lack of loyalty was no surprise. … It just showed me that you cannot do it that way. Speaking about Cheney, Bush told Meacham, “He had his own empire there and marched to his own drummer. (Only one person, James Baker, has ever transcended those tight categories.) Staff pursue the family’s interests, not their own.īush 41’s news-making remark to Meacham was, in effect, an accusation that Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had violated this cardinal rule during Bush 43’s Administration. What the Bushes expect from these people is not just competence but loyalty. These are just a few of dozens of examples, from all realms of policy and politics. Robert Zoellick and Stephen Hadley worked for 41 and 43, and are now advising Jeb Bush’s Presidential campaign. The Bushes do a brisk internal trade in advisers.

That’s what we’ve all been wondering about. Bush were about what Bush 41 really thought of Bush 43’s Presidency. So it wasn’t surprising that the first snippets released from Jon Meacham’s biography of George H. Still, the political Bushes appear to be a family business whose deliberations are tantalizingly out of the public’s reach. And if Bush’s fellow-Texan Ross Perot had not run against him, in 1992, there would be no Clinton dynasty, either. If Ronald Reagan had not chosen George Bush as his Vice-President, there would be no Bush dynasty today. It looked as if the Bushes had been right to decide that Texas would be a more propitious environment for Republicans than their former home, Connecticut, but had done so prematurely. Bush’s best friend, James Baker, had lost his only political campaign, for Texas attorney general.

Bush, had just lost his first race for political office, a congressional campaign in West Texas. Senate, a body to which his father had belonged, had launched a quixotic-seeming Presidential campaign of his own. Meanwhile, in Texas, George Herbert Walker Bush, who had lost two races for the U.S. Ted Kennedy was preparing to run for President, and many people thought it was inevitable that he would win. In 1979, the Kennedys were our leading political dynasty. We are probably too quick to declare any family that has produced more than one elected officeholder to be a political dynasty: many other democratic countries (India, the Philippines, Argentina) are far more dynastic than the United States. Bush and his father underestimated the extent to which Dick Cheney was dedicated to his own political and foreign-policy agendas.

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