How are the Bushes viewed within the Republican Party?
There was always a sense that George H.W. Bush was somebody who didn’t owe anything to voters — he couldn’t even win an election for Congress. His push came from people behind the scenes, from the Establishment. Both his grandparents were heavily involved in wartime finance and military contracting during World War I — they were there at the very start of the military-industrial complex — and his father was a U.S. senator who directed an oil-services company like Halliburton. They had ties to big money, big oil and the Eastern old-boys network. Bush’s enemies in the party were people who were insulted by the way he played on his privilege and connections. Richard Nixon was one; Ronald Reagan was another. Donald Rumsfeld didn’t like him, either — he and a lot of others in the Ford administration thought Bush was a lightweight. In one of Rumsfeld’s greatest miscalculations, he put Bush in charge of the CIA, thinking that would ice Bush’s political future. Instead, it was like throwin
