Don’t Call It A Dynasty

The Bushes hate the word Dynasty, but they can’t resist telling these kinds of stories: on the first day of his son’s presidency, George Herbert Walker Bush, tired and cold from the Inauguration parade, was relaxing in a tub in the White House when he heard a knock at the bathroom door. It was a longtime butler telling him that the President wanted to see him in the Oval Office. At first, a groggy Bush was a bit confused about who this President was. Then, of course, he realized it was his son. He considered saying no, wanting to finish his soaking, but he thought better of it, and so the wet former President sprang out of the tub, got dressed and, with still damp hair, went over to the Oval Office to visit his eldest child. The moment of one President being summoned by another was immortalized in a picture that popped up around the White House.

The scene was repeated almost exactly four years later, and this time it was Barbara Bush who was eager to describe it. “We had a repeat of it the day after the election this year,” she told TIME. “George was in the shower, and George W. at 7 a.m. came by, and he said, ‘Mom, where’s Dad?’ I said, ‘He’s in the shower.’ He said, ‘Well, tell him if he wants to come up to the Oval Office, I’d love to have him over there.’ You never saw a guy get out of the shower so fast in your life and get over there.”

You get the point: this family may have produced two Presidents of the U.S., the Governors of the second and fourth most populous states and one U.S. Senator, but theirs is an accidental dynasty, perpetuated, above all, by a sense of humility. “No braggadocio” is how White House chief of staff Andy Card describes the family ethic. “I know from President Bush 41 that he was chastised by his mother not to practice braggadocio. When they have a lot to brag about, there is no pounding of the chest,” he says.

Compare the Bushes with the Kennedys, and it’s the Republican clan that casts the longer shadow. A Kennedy was President for a thousand days or so, but if George W. Bush completes his second term, someone named Bush will have been President for 4,383 days. There has been a Bush on the Republican ticket for six of the past seven presidential elections and a Bush in or near the White House for 16 of the past 24 years. And the run may not be over. Jeb Bush said in October that he would not run in 2008, but not everyone believes that promise is airtight. “I think there’s still a sliver of a chance he goes,” said one of Jeb’s confidants. “First, it’s the family business, and it’s hard to see him leaving it. And there are enough unemployed Bush samurai out there who will want to eat and who will lean on him to run. He may not want to do it now, but I think he may.”

Some of what drives the family can be found in ancient tribal script laid down by the patriarch, the President’s grandfather, Senator Prescott Bush, who died in 1972, a decade after he left elective office. He told the oral-history project at Columbia University in 1966 that “everybody doesn’t have an equal obligation. Some people have better opportunities than others to serve and better faculties, better equipment … to do something about the public service.” But if noblesse oblige is one ingredient behind the family’s magic, it doesn’t begin to describe the permanent marks the Bushes have made on American political life in the past 25 years. Several other traits help explain their success:

•THEY MOVE WITH THEIR PARTY

The Bush machine has carefully tracked the geographic and philosophical changes in the G.O.P. over the past 50 years. Both the family and the party slipped their moorings in the moderate Northeastern U.S. in the 1960s and drifted South and West, toward new, more conservative strongholds in the Sunbelt. Prescott Bush was an iconic, New England moderate Republican who played golf with Ike and supported Planned Parenthood. George H.W. Bush straddled both worlds, running from Texas as a Goldwater Republican in 1964 but also embracing the Big Government Republicanism of Nixon in the ’70s. By ’88, he was again in synch with his party, having moved rightward to embrace the Reagan legacy but later pushing off with a “kinder, gentler” thrust that voters admired. Jeb, who is perhaps the most socially conservative Bush, is the most multicultured: he married a Mexican woman, and his children speak fluent Spanish. It’s a good bet his son George Prescott Bush, 28, will run for something in the years ahead. But the distant from Prescott to Jeb is unmistakable: Jeb finds himself in court these days fighting to keep the husband of a severely incapacitated Florida woman from turning off her respirator.

•THEY LEARN FROM THEIR MISTAKES

Every Bush has tasted defeat early on, and that too is both a rite of passage and a secret weapon: the Bushes go to school on their own failures. Prescott Bush lost a U.S. Senate bid in 1950 before he was elected two years later. George H.W. Bush also tried for the Senate in 1964 but was defeated and later won a seat in Congress. In 1994 Jeb blew his first attempt to become Florida Governor. And W. got shellacked when he first ran for Congress, in 1978. “I vowed never to get out-countried again,” W. told TIME FOUR YEARS AGO. They even study one another’s losses. Oone night in 1994, Bush peppered a houseguest who had worked for his father for four years with questions about why the old man has lost in 1992. “They learn from their defeats, and they keep coming after you,” said a friend who likens them to science-fiction characters who will not die despite being bombarded by lasers..

•THEY SPREAD ACROSS THE COUNTRY

This isn’t just a family; it’s also a national franchise system. Bush children for years were told to “Go forth and seek your fortunes elsewhere,” just as the Walkers and the Bushes had done in the 1920s. And so they have: after college and grad school George W. went back to Texas. Jeb went to Florida. Other sons gave Virginia and Colorado a try. The by-product was like a series of feeder colonies, a 50-state network with kinsmen and pyramid builders always ready to report for duty. Even the matriarch, Barbara Bush, who would dismiss the word dynasty with a frosty toss of her head, was known to remind people back in 1999 that “1 out of every 8 Americans is governed by a Bush.”

•THEY’RE MORE LIKE US THAN YOU THINK

The Bushes have developed an Everyfamily feel that they lacked 25 years ago, and this too has made them better pols. Bush 41 grew up taking a limousine to school but then moved to dusty West Texas and suffered the loss of his first daughter. Bush 43 struggled at business and had a notoriously irresponsible streak until his 40th birthday. Jeb’s wife Columba was fined for customs violations, and his daughter Noelle has battled prescription-drug addiction. Neil Bush, the President’s brother, went through an eyebrow-raising divorce. And First Daughters Barbara and Jenna have been caught on the wrong side of fake IDs once or twice. The Bushes stopped marrying heirs and heiresses a generation ago. They went from being highbrow Episcopalians to being Methodists like W. and Catholics like Jeb. And many in the family have known their share of heartbreak. All that has humanized the formidable family and made the Bushes stronger at the gut-level game of connecting emotionally with voters in the crunch of a close campaign.

So why the reluctance to admit the business they are really in? It would be unwise to tout oneself as a dynasty in a country that specifically bans nobility in the Constitution. Plus, it wars with the family’s kitchen-table lesson that calling attention to oneself is tacky, if not just plain wrong. “President Bush [41] would cross out every personal pronoun in his speech drafts, changing every I to a we,” recalls his staff secretary James Cicconi. “The family ethic frowns upon anyone who is self-centered or self-seeking.”

That too is just smart politics. And in that category, the results speak for themselves.