Michael Hirsh is national editor for Politico Magazine.

Jeb Bush may be his “own man,” as he declared Wednesday in his inaugural foreign-policy speech as a putative presidential candidate. But to hear GOP insiders describe it, the former Florida governor is pulling together his foreign-policy team with a distinctive Bush-family recipe in mind, adding a strong dash of 43 (his hawkish brother) to a sprinkling of 41 (his moderate dad), mainly to make himself more palatable to mistrustful and still-mostly-hawkish GOP primary base voters.

Bush’s advisory team is being pulled together by two mainstream Republican foreign-policy experts who served both his father and his brother, Richard Haass and Robert Zoellick. They have enlisted not only old GOP lions like James Baker—who first served under Gerald Ford, then Ronald Reagan and distinguished himself as George H.W. Bush’s secretary of State—but also neoconservatives such as Iraq war advocate Paul Wolfowitz and John Hannah, Dick Cheney’s former national security advisor.


According to one long-time GOP foreign-policy expert who is not yet part of the Bush team but has consulted with the candidate informally, the neocons were added to help shore up Bush’s credibility with a party base that barely knows him and is already suspicious of his moderate views on immigration and education.

“Jeb is building a campaign of mass — of big donors and a big foreign policy list of advisers,” says the GOP foreign-policy expert, noting that Bush hopes a broad array of advisers will appease voters of different stripes.

“No one can point in the last decade and a half to a great Jeb Bush speech where he really lit up a group of primary voters,” the expert said. “He’s basically spent a lot of time with donors.”

The presence of Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush’s popular national security adviser and secretary of state, on Jeb’s foreign-policy team may also help with the GOP base during the primaries. And notably absent is former Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose spokeswoman, Peggy Cifrino, said that he had not been asked “and is not aware of any group except for what he reads in the news.” Viewed as a renegade member of W’s first-term team, Powell has since endorsed Barack Obama twice. Also not included on the new Bush team is another opponent of the Iraq war, Brent Scowcroft, George H.W. Bush's national security advisor and close friend.

Haass, who last served in government as Powell’s deputy and was, like Powell, an Iraq war skeptic, is himself considered suspiciously middle-of-the-road among conservatives, which may be one reason he is advising Bush out of the public eye. Haass also can’t be seen as formally joining Bush’s campaign because he is president of the Council on Foreign Relations, a not-for-profit organization that remains non-partisan. “Richard advises a range of elected and appointed officials and candidates on both sides of the aisle,” said Haass’s spokeswoman, Lisa Shields.

Zoellick, whose long and multifarious career has included service to Reagan, George H.W. Bush (whom he served as undersecretary of state under Baker) and George W. Bush (when he was deputy secretary of state, U.S. trade representative and then World Bank president), told POLITICO Magazine in an email that he was “trying to assist” Jeb on economics as well as foreign policy, and had mainly “relayed the names of many people who would like to help. My primary suggestion is to set up a process to help the governor gain diverse views.” Zoellick cautioned that “frankly, times have changed from 41/43 (or 42)” and “most people don’t fit into tight categories of views.”

Indeed, the broad composition of Bush’s foreign-policy team—which was rolled out Wednesday ahead of his Chicago speech—may only confuse rather than clarify where he stands until the candidate himself spends more time fleshing out views that are sketchy at best. “He’s trying to be everything to everybody,” says the GOP foreign-policy veteran.

Further adding to the confusion, Bush is said to have spent only a limited amount of time on his Chicago speech, which was larded with generalizations and standard Republican chestnuts about the need for a strong defense and broad engagement with allies, along with mild criticism of President Obama.

In public, Bush has resolutely refused to signal whether he’d be more like his father or his brother, seeking to bridge the family gap with attestations of loyalty: “I love my dad. In fact, my dad is the greatest man alive,” he said in February. “And I love my brother. I think he’s been a great president.”

In the end he may rely more on mainstream advisors like Harvard’s Meghan O’Sullivan, who began as Haass’s protégé but also served W.’s administration as a hands-on Iraq administrator and is considered more a tempered thinker in the vein of his father’s foreign-policy team, which was dominated by Baker and Scowcroft. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that Bush is considering making O’Sullivan his top foreign-policy aide.

But Bush knows that the deeply conservative GOP party base still views his father with suspicion. Fairly or not, Bush I is mainly remembered for his 1991 “Chicken Kiev” speech –when he cautioned Ukrainians against “suicidal nationalism” if they voted to leave the Soviet Union too quickly — and his general caution in dealing with the former Soviet bloc; as well as for leaving Saddam Hussein in power after the first Gulf War. At a time when Jeb is attacking Obama for indecisiveness and weakness abroad, as he did Wednesday, the last thing he can afford is to be to be too identified with his father during the primaries.

Oddly enough, however, if he wins the GOP nomination, Jeb may have to tack back toward his father, whose stature it has improved dramatically among historians and whose foreign policy is still viewed favorably in most general polls, while George W. Bush left office in January 2009 with 58 percent of Americans viewing him negatively. A more recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll late last year found that 66 percent believe the Iraq War was “not worth it.”

“I think it is going to be tricky proposition for him,” says Eric Edelman, another former senior official in the George W. Bush administration, adding that “it is very easy to exaggerate how different 41 and 43 were, in the sense that they both are basically products of conservative Republican internationalism, if you will. Were there different emphases in their policies? Yes. But if you look at Russia policy, and W’s relationship with Putin, one can argue that it’s not that different in from the way 41 approached Gorbachev. On China policy, I’m not sure there’s that big a difference. And 41 went to war in Iraq as well.”

In his speech, Bush said he was “fortunate to have a father and a brother who helped shape America’s foreign-policy from the oval office.”

But some conservative pundits think this history will prove far more of a double burden, especially if Bush wins the nomination.

“This is not going to be a real issue in the Republican primaries,” predicts Erick Erickson, who blogs for the conservative Redstate.com. “The candidates will largely all be on the same page except Rand Paul. His problem in the primaries will be domestic policy. His general election weakness will be that he is a third Bush.”