Moon and the Bushes

American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush

by Kevin Phillips

(September 7, 2004)



Kevin Phillips has been a political and economic commentator for more than three decades. A former White House strategist, he is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times and National Public Radio and also writes for Harper’s and Time. His nine books include the New York Times bestsellers The Politics of Rich and Poor and Wealth and Democracy. He lives in Connecticut.

PREFACE

This book has changed a lot—in length, indignation, and its hitherto unpublished information—since I began writing it in December 2002. My original ambition was to identify and explain the Bush-related transformation of the U.S. presidency into an increasingly dynastic office, a change with profound consequences for the American Republic, given the factors of family bias, domestic special interests, and foreign grudges that the Bushes, father and son, brought into the White House.

Unfortunately, in examining two Bush presidencies and the family’s four-generation pursuit of national prominence and power—and in doing so through a lens that highlighted elite associations, dynastic ambitions, and recurring financial and business practices—I found a greater basis for dismay and disillusionment than I had imagined. The result is an unusual and unflattering portrait of a great family (great in power, not morality) that has built a base over the course of the twentieth century in the back corridors of the new military-industrial complex and in close association with the growing intelligence and national security establishments. In doing so, the Bushes have threaded their way through damning political, banking, and armaments scandals and, since the 1980s, controversies like the October Surprise, Iran-Contra, and Iraqgate imbroglios, which in another climate or a different time might have led to impeachment.

I am not talking about ordinary lack of business ethics or financial corruption. During the late twentieth century, several other presidents and their families displayed these shortcomings, and the public has become understandably blasé. Four generations of building toward dynasty, however, have infused the Bush family’s hunger for power and practices of crony capitalism with a moral arrogance and backstage disregard of the democratic and republican traditions of the U.S. government. As we will see, four generations of involvement with clandestine arms deals and European and Middle Eastern rogue banks will do that.

American Dynasty is on the one hand a book about economics, history, and politics in the era that covers the two Bush presidencies. But it is also a portrait of four Bush (and Walker) generations—their ambitions, financial practices, scandals, and wars. It brings into focus many circumstances and relationships that have not previously been examined together and seriously discussed, for reasons that are both unusual and unfortunate. During the late 1970s and 1980s, the Bush clan in a sense flew under the radar of critical biography and investigation.

… The research I did on politics and religion in writing chapter 7 was a revelation to me, as I hope it will be to readers.

That the Bushes have many qualities to commend them as a private family—community involvement, generosity to those who work for them—is not really the point. They are not a private family. They are a public family, and one that is writing a new definition of the presidency. They are bending public policy toward family grudges and interests. What matters is their policy and conduct in that emerging role. The further evidence, since 9/11, of the United States’ becoming an embattled imperium, even showing faint specklings of garrison state thinking, only doubles the stakes.

True, the dynastic trend in the United States goes deeper than the Bushes. If Hillary Clinton runs for president in 2008, the failings and lingering grudges of her family’s own would-be dynasty will be fair game. And thus we may learn—for better or worse—more about the transformation and perils of American politics. This book, however, is about the dynasty we already have and what it stands for. This is the direction in which national politics and national discussion must turn first.

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From Chapter 7

The American Presidency and the Rise of the Religious Right

page 226

… Bush’s religious allies also responded to the large number of top personnel and policymaking jobs given to Christian Right appointees, especially where they would deal with hot-button subject matter: church-state relations, federal aid to religion, women’s rights, birth control, abortion-related drugs, family aid, and federal volunteer programs.

As head of the Office of Personnel Management, in charge of federal workforce support, Bush chose conservative activist Kay Coles James, formerly dean of the Robertson School of Government at Pat Robertson-founded Regent University. David Caprara, made head of AmeriCorps VISTA, the federal community volunteers group, had directed the American Family Coalition, a faith-based affiliate of Sun Myung Moon’s Uniﬁcation Church. By some accounts, Caprara was one of Moon’s top grassroots organizers.38





pages 232-236

… Anthony T. Evans of Dallas, who likewise preached a worldview based on the Bible, was a speaker at the pre-inaugural Washington Prayer luncheon in January 2001 sponsored by Sun Myung Moon and choreographed by former Bush assistant Doug Wead. Identified in 2001 by the New York Times as a friend and confidant from whom Bush often sought spiritual guidance, Evans told a British journalist that for Bush in Texas, “one of the impetuses for his considering running for president was biblical teaching. He feels God is talking to him.”59

What Hayford and Evans had in common, other preachers said, was a shared adherence to “Kingdom Now” or Dominionist theology. Loosely put, it called for seizure of earthly power by “the people of God” as the only way by which the world could be rescued. Prayer and evangelism were not enough; a Christian-led political and social reformation was necessary because Christ will not return to earth until a revived church has set the scene. Evans, in particular, had written several books on prophecy and the future. A president convinced that God was speaking to him, some pundits surmised, might through Dominionism start to view himself as an agent called by the Almighty to restore the earth to godly control.

Author Bob Woodward, in his book Bush at War, had already perceived a sweeping assumption of mission in the president’s September 14 response to Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden: “Our responsibility to history is already clear: To answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.” To Woodward, “the president was casting his vision and that of the country in the grand vision of God’s master plan.”60

In 1999, before the campaign began in earnest, George W. Bush had assembled pastors for a “laying on of hands” and told them he had been “called” to higher office.61 A year after 9/11, David Gergen, a longtime adviser to presidents, told the New York Times that Bush “has made it clear he feels that Providence intervened to save his life, and now he is somehow an instrument of Providence.”62 After an analysis of presidential rhetoric, Baptist minister and Interfaith Alliance leader Welton Gaddy concluded, “You see a growing feeling he [believes] he is, in fact, a divinely chosen leader in this moment of history. It’s as if he discovered the power of religion late in life and thinks the nation needs to [do the same].”63

If true believers were thrilled, the nation’s secular citizens were not. Before Bush, even the most religious of U.S. presidents had perused the Bible for notes of grace, not strategic mandates. Woodrow Wilson did not ponder the battleﬁeld at Megiddo before deciding to send troops to France in 1917. Nor did William McKinley, in contemplating war with the Spanish Empire, consult the Book of Revelation. For a president to interweave international geopolitics and the Bible—to submerge realpolitik in New and Old Testament eschatology—had no American precedent.

Beyond Dominionism and hints of divine guidance, a further Bush controversy lay in making belief in Jesus ﬁt alongside collaboration with Sun Myung Moon—a self-proclaimed messiah—and his international Uniﬁcation Church. This controversial association began with the elder Bush. During 1995 and 1996, two years after leaving the White House, he made at least nine paid appearances in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Tokyo, Washington, and elsewhere on behalf of Moon. The Korean businessman and evangelist, who dismissed Jesus as a failure and styled himself “the Lord of the Second Advent,” was said to be paying the former president $100,000 per speech. The Argentine newspaper La Nacion also reported rumors that Bush and Moon might do business together in South America.64

The forty-first president, who told Argentine president Carlos Menem that he had joined Moon in Buenos Aires for the money, had actually known the Korean reasonably well for decades. Their relationship went back to the overlap between Bush’s one-year tenure as CIA director (1976) and the arrival in Washington of Moon, whose Uniﬁcation Church was widely reported to be a front group for the South Korean Central Intelligence Agency.65 Within Washington councils, Bush was a powerful voice against any unnecessary crackdown on the U.S. activities of allied intelligence services. In the eighties, Moon and his newspaper, the Washington Times, prominently supported Reagan-Bush Iran-Contra activities and Republican causes.

George H. W. Bush’s praise for Moon and the conservative newspapers he ran, including the influential Times, surprised the press in Buenos Aires. The Reuters story ﬁled on November 25, 1996, was headlined “Bush Praises Sun Myung Moon as ‘Man of Vision.’” It also reminded readers that “Argentina’s influential Catholic Church takes issue with Moon’s portrayal of himself as an incarnation of God fulfilling the mission of Christ. Critics say he brainwashes the vulnerable into joining him, and some countries, such as Germany, consider him a threat to public order and refuse him an entry visa.”

Four years later, President-elect George W. Bush allowed his onetime religious aide, Doug Wead, to arrange a Moon-sponsored Inaugural Prayer Luncheon on January 19, 2001, a Washington event that drew over 1,700 public officials, ministers, and conservative activists. Some attendees felt deceived by not having been told of Moon’s role in the event. One was Morris Chapman, the chief executive of the 18-million-member Southern Baptist Convention. “I was shocked,” he said, “to see that Sun Myung Moon was on the program and, in essence, the host. I was even more surprised on the way out to be given a propaganda book on the Uniﬁcation Church.” Chapman added that the event “will serve to remind evangelical Christians that the world increasingly is filled with wolves in sheep’s clothing.”66

That Bush aides would collaborate with a group described as “wolves” by the Southern Baptist Convention worried some conservatives. Steve Hassan, a journalist who followed religious cults, had for years found Moon’s Washington acceptance just as puzzling: “Here’s a man [Moon] who says he wants to take over the world, where all religions will be abolished except Unificationism, all languages will be abolished except Korean, all governments will be abolished except his one-world theocracy, yet he’s wined and dined very powerful people and convinced them that he’s benign.”67

Whatever the explanation, radical religion had been wielding ever more political power around the world. The Mutawwa’in, the Saudi religious police, had searched out hidden church services among the millions of Filipinos, Koreans, and other foreign workers, sometimes imposing death sentences. But the Saudis were too important for Washington to criticize. Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, another close U.S. ally, doubtless greeted hundreds of religious extremists during his tenure in office. However, like the Saudis—and like the Bushes fraternizing with end-times preachers and Sun Myung Moon—Sharon walked away largely unscathed.

In the United States after 9/11, only Muslim fanatics and religious extremists were generally so identified. U.S. citizens working to bring on Armageddon were not. Most Americans were too angry to care that Africans, Latin Americans, and Asians saw hypocrisy in this—and that such inconsistencies seriously damaged U.S. standing abroad. In June 2003, Washington’s Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released new spring poll results updating its huge mid-2002 sampling of what people in forty-four nations around the world thought of the United States. Few such negative measurements of American war policy—cum—diplomacy had ever been recorded.

In the 2002 Pew Survey, negative attitudes toward the United States had on the whole been conﬁned to the Middle East and Pakistan. Following Bush’s announcement of the close of the war with Iraq, survey takers reported that U.S. unpopularity had spread to Africa and to Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation. Some 83 percent of Indonesians had a negative view of America, up from 36 percent a year earlier. “Dislike of the United States had really deepened and spread throughout the Muslim world,” said Andrew Kohut, the Pew Center director. Majorities of those sampled in seven of eight predominantly Muslim nations worried that their nation would be attacked by the United States. In all but four of the nations polled in the spring of 2003, however, respondents said that the problem in the United States was “mostly Bush” rather than “Americans in general.”68

Americans, however, continued to assume that the extremists and terrorists loose in the world were mostly Islamic—Hamas, leftover mujahideen, Taliban, Hezbollah, and, of course, Al Qaeda. These were the names that became synonymous with death and murder. Ironically, Bruce Lincoln, a professor of divinity at the University of Chicago, studied Osama bin Laden’s words taped in early October following the destruction of the World Trade Center and found him constructing “a Manichean struggle, where Sons of Light confront sons of darkness, and all must enlist on one side or the other.”

To his followers and the world, bin Laden said: “I tell them [the Americans] that these events have divided the world into two camps, the camp of the faithful and the camp of infidels. May God shield us and you from them.”69 He exulted that America would now feel what the West had done to Islam.

The second Manichaean view came from Washington. Professor Lincoln explained how George W. Bush, in his October 7, 2001, address to the American people, approached the confrontation in a similar way but with the sides reversed: “Every nation has a choice to make in this conflict,” said Bush. “There is no neutral ground. If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents, they have become outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own peril.”70

Richard Neuhaus, a theologian allied with the Bush administration, nevertheless acknowledged “the hard reality of religion in defining, more and more, the lines of conflict in politics among nations. The war against terrorism is—more than it is politic for world leaders to say in public—also a war of religion.”71 History, though, does not usually explain religious wars—the eleventh-to-fourteenth-century Crusades, for example—as good versus evil.