The Bushes 'wasp Corleones'

The Bushes are ‘Wasp Corleones’, the Newsweek reporter Howard Fineman said, as if their power could be accounted for only by hinting at criminality. Yet the Bushes and the Hunts are infinitely more powerful than the Corleones ever were.

It isn’t the case that US politics has been dominated by the internal politics of families; the clans are not a cartel. But it’s also possible to underestimate or misrepresent the importance of such families, and the impact some of them have had on business and politics.

Clans that have sought to preserve their wealth and political clout through successive generations are a feature of American political society. They aren’t typical of a particular region, although Southerners – and especially Texans – tend to be less wary about their admiration for them. It’s not a coincidence that Gone with the Wind and Dallas, both hugely popular dynastic stories, were largely about Southern clans.

Weisberg describes the Walker-Bush clan very well. George H.W. Bush said that in his family fathers never dictate to their sons what they should do. ‘It’s not that this is John F. Kennedy’s father driving his sons to do something,’ he said shortly after the 2000 election. ‘We are not that way in this family. This is not about vindication or legacy or entitlement.’ There seems little reason to question this depiction of his family’s values: feral would be one way to describe George W. Bush in his youth. Weisberg tells how he returned drunk one night to the family home in Houston and crashed his car into the dustbins. When his father appeared, Bush challenged him to fight ‘mano a mano’.

At apress-meets-the-president dinner held in Washington at the beginning of spring, Bush sang a version of ‘Green Green Grass of Home’, a song made famous by Tom Jones:

Yes you’re all gonna miss me,

The way you used to diss me.

But soon I’ll touch the brown, brown grass of home.

‘Green Green Grass of Home’ is about a man awaiting his execution, who will come home to a grave.