Not the faith of their fathers

Peter Stothard, Thirty Days: An Inside Account of Tony Blair at War (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 240 pp., $13.95.

Philip Stevens, Tony Blair: The Making of a World Leader (New York: Viking, 2004), 265 pp., $24.95.

Peter Schweizer and Rochelle Schweizer, The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 524 pp., $27.95.

Craig Unger, House of Bush: House of Saud (New York: Scribners, 2004), 356 pp., $26.

Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (New York: Viking, 2004), 397 pp., $25.95.

ON THURSDAY, March 20, 2003, when the American stealth bombers launched the war a trifle ahead of schedule with the decapitation attempt on Saddam Hussein, Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair told his staff that he wanted to end his televised address to the nation with the words "God bless you." The staff erupted in protest until Blair grumbled, through brushes and sponges as his make-up was applied, "You are the most ungodly lot I have ever...." His speechwriter, Peter Hyman, who is Jewish (and less than fully employed since Blair writes his important speeches himself), objected "Ungodly?--count me out." Somebody else on the staff suggested it was not quite the same God. "It is the same God", said Blair firmly. In the end, Blair closed his speech with a tame "Thank you."

Shortly before the "God bless you" suggestion, which would have startled British viewers accustomed to hearing such invocations of the Almighty only in the speeches of American presidents, Blair had asked his staff how he should begin the broadcast. His then-press secretary and close adviser Alastair Campbell dryly suggested "My fellow Americans...."

Blair did not even dignify that jest with a reply, but this anecdote, recorded by the former editor of the Times, Sir Peter Stothard, who was enjoying fly-on-the-wall status with Blair for a period of thirty days, neatly encapsulates two of the salient characteristics of Blair's time in Number 10, Downing Street. First, he is the most openly and devoutly religious prime minister Britain has known in a century. Blair is a member of the Church of England, but his wife and children are Roman Catholics, and Blair in his ecumenical way would on occasion take Holy Communion with them. Eventually Cardinal Basil Hume, head of the Catholic Church in England, wrote to Blair asking him to desist from taking the sacrament when he attended a Catholic mass. Blair complied, but in his reply wrote a mild theological rebuke, asking the Cardinal, "I wonder what Jesus would have made of it?"

Second, even his staff is uncomfortably aware that Blair's support of the highly unpopular President George W. Bush is not just a political liability, but reflects a widespread suspicion in Britain that Blair is far too pro-American in general. More than any prime minister before him, Blair runs Downing Street as if it were the White House, depending to an unusual degree on personal and party loyalists rather than the customary apolitical civil servants, and on his skill in raising campaign funds from wealthy donors rather than subjecting himself to Labour's traditional debt to the trade unions. Critics complain that Blair is far too casual in his dealings with the Labour Members of Parliament, relying instead on his quasi-presidential relationship with the British voters, and that his economic policies tend more to the entrepreneurial American model rather than the traditional welfare state dependence that characterized previous Labour leaders and many of Britain's partners in the European Union.

Onward Christian Soldiers

IT IS AN extraordinary trick of fate .that as the War on Terror got under way, and as Britain (along with Israel and the United States) found itself on the receiving end of Bin Laden's jihad, the United Kingdom should be led by a man so openly devoted to the American alliance and to the Christian faith. The Christianity was an act of mature choice; he first took Communion at the age of twenty and was admitted to the Anglican Church by the chaplain of St. John's College, Oxford. This was unusual in the early 1970s, particularly for an undergraduate who played in a rock band and at least once played strip poker until both he and a female friend had shed their entire clothing. But one of Blair's great college friends was Peter Thomson, an Australian mature student and Anglican priest in his thirties. Thomson's inspiration (and subsequently Blair's) was John Macmurray, a Scottish thinker of the mid-20th century. Macmurray argued that the individual was shaped by the family and community in which the person grew and acted, and that strong families and strong local communities that demanded responsibilities from their members built a strong and supportive society. "We are not stranded in isolation, but owe a duty both to others and ourselves", Blair wrote in 1993. The idea of community lay at the heart of Christianity. "The act of holy Communion is symbolic of this message. It acknowledges that we do not grow up in total independence but interdependently."

This he wrote in a short book, the purpose of which was to convince the British voters that Labour had indeed learned its lesson and rethought its political message, while also suggesting to party activists that the old traditions of Christian socialism had much to offer a modernized Labour ideology, especially after having lost four elections in succession. Labour's commitment to society (the very existence of which Margaret Thatcher famously doubted) was for Blair a foundation of his political belief. The core values of the Labour Party, he maintained, were "closely intertwined with those of Christianity."

BOTH PETER Stothard's Thirty Days and the excellent new biography of Blair by Philip Stephens, a Financial Times columnist, rightly focus on Blair's religious faith as an unusual and distinctive characteristic of the first Labour leader to win two successive full terms as prime minister. Stephens, however, goes into much greater depth and argues persuasively that Blair's faith provided a crucial political breakthrough. In 1993 the abduction by two older boys of a two year-old child was filmed by a shopping center's security camera. The little boy was then gruesomely murdered, and the haunting image of the trusting child being led to his doom became a staple of television news, stunning Britain. Blair's response, which gave him prominence as a different kind of politician of the Left, contrasted sharply with the traditional view of the Labour Party that crime was the fault of an unjust society.

   I have no doubt that the breakdown of law
   and order is intimately linked to the breakup
   of a string sense of community. And the
   breakup of community in turn is, to a crucial
   degree, consequent on the breakdown of family
   life, [Blair said]. It is largely from family
   discipline that social discipline and sense of
   responsibility is learned.

Together with his striking and memorable sound bite, that he would be "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime", this stance, more than anything else that Labour did in its 18 years in the political wilderness, made the Party electable again. At the time, Blair did not make any overtly religious argument, but subsequently he put the case for Labour's robust new approach to law and order within a clear religious context by addressing the concept, now notably out of fashion, of sin. "Yet the concept is simple and important. In theological terms, it is alienation from God. In everyday terms, it is acknowledgement of right and wrong", Blair said. "This is an area that will become of increasing importance in politics."

Politicians in Britain had not spoken in such terms for decades, and even longer. Stephens suggests that not since the great Liberal statesman William Ewart Gladstone, who along with Disraeli dominated British political life from the 1850s to the 1880s, had the twin themes of morality and religion been so prominent in the speeches and actions of a prime minister. Many political commentators, products of a more secular and irreverent time, found Blair's beliefs hard to take seriously, despite their rather obvious postmodernist twist. One notably aggressive TV interviewer asked Blair, live on camera, whether he and Bush prayed together, in tones that implied he had scored a devastating hit.

The almost-Catholic Englishman and the born-again American no doubt practice very different styles of Christianity. It is hard to imagine Blair praying on the telephone with the family of a serviceman, as then-Governor Bush prayed with the family of Steven Gonzales when he was captured by Serb forces. Perhaps Blair would not have been quite as self-effacing as Bush in 1999, when the then-Governor of Texas returned from fundraising in Michigan to join a memorial service for the seven worshippers killed by a gunman in a Fort Worth church. Bush refused to speak or go onto the podium, saying it was a religious event, not a political one. Instead, he sat and prayed with the crowd. But the two men share a profound religious conviction, and a clear sense of the way that faith illuminates their political lives and actions. It should, therefore, come as less of a surprise that Bush and Blair have forged such a close personal bond, reinforcing all the deep institutional ties through intelligence and nuclear and military cooperation that have given "the special relationship" its unique and mutually useful character throughout most of the past sixty years.

It has become fashionable in Britain to mock this bond. And while I have yet to meet any serious British journalist or official who has worked in Washington who has not been impressed or even awed by its durability and potency, it is easy to understand why. Britain's commercial and institutional ties are increasingly with the European Union. Blair's Foreign Office last year produced a White Paper on British foreign policy in which two telling charts defined the direction in which British self-interest currently points. The EU provides 48 percent of Britain's inward investment, while the United States provides only 35 percent. And while the United States accounts for 15 percent of British trade, the EU now accounts for 53 percent, a figure likely to approach 60 percent after the EU's May 1 enlargement with ten new member states. (1)

This sense that the Anglo-American relationship was a dwindling asset, which had been marked during the first Bush Administration with its powerful commitment to German unification, fueled some querulous demands back in Britain to know just what reward British interests received in return for Blair's devotion. (The mass-market tabloid, Daily Mirror, ran a now-infamous front-page headline describing Blair as "Bush's Poodle.") The answer is that in the buildup to the war, Britain became a part of the American inter-agency process, reminding one senior Bush Administration official of the remark of Henry Kissinger in his memoirs that, while President Nixon's national security adviser, he "took the British more into my confidence than I did the U.S. State Department." Furthermore, Bush knew, even though some members of Blair's government did not, that Blair on the eve of the crucial pre-war vote in the House of Commons had written his letter of resignation and entrusted it to the Cabinet Secretary. Bush said that if it would help, he would be happy for the British forces to stay out of the invasion. Blair replied that there were some causes more important than one's political career.

And given that Blair was a believer, warning publicly of the danger of weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein's hands since the Clinton era and was never shy of using force (he was more of a humanitarian hawk on Kosovo than was Clinton), Bush almost certainly would have had Blair's support even had he paid less attention to his domestic difficulties. In the event, through persuasion rather than any threats to deny British support, Blair got quite a lot. He was able to convince Bush of the need to attempt a second United Nations resolution (which infuriated Vice President Dick Cheney). And a week before the Iraq War broke out, Blair had succeeded, at least in his own mind, in winning an important concession from the White House.

President Bush had agreed, at Blair's persistent urging, to publish the road map to a renewed peace process in the Middle East, a step that Blair saw as an essential signal to Muslim opinion as British and American troops prepared to invade Iraq. Indeed it was Blair who made the announcement on the road map from Downing Street. As he chose which tie he would wear for the television cameras, Alastair Campbell entered with Blair's text in hand. "Sorry", Campbell said, according to the Stothard account. "President Bush doesn't like your text. He's rewriting it now."

"One day your sense of humor will get you into big trouble. Or, more important, me into big trouble. Now, where was I?" Blair replied, and returned to choosing his tie. (Campbell, who later resigned from Blair's service pleading exhaustion, at least owes one remarkable souvenir to his prime minister's closeness to Bush. When they were all in Northern Ireland on April 8, 2003, just as Basra fell to the British troops and American forces penetrated Baghdad, and when Bush made yet another concession to Blair by promising "a vital role" for the United Nations in postwar Iraq, Campbell received a $100 personal check from the American president, a contribution to Campbell's marathon run for charity.)

AT LEAST one of the American books now being reviewed, the sound and thorough account of the Bush political dynasty by Peter and Rochelle Schweizer, appreciates the importance of the British connections to the Bushes; Margaret Thatcher for Bush 41, and Blair for Bush 43. Indeed, the Schweizers unearth one genuinely new nugget of information that seems to have eluded British journalists. In the 1950s, one of the investors in Bush the Elder's Zapata oil firm (and a member of its board of directors) was James Gammell. The Bushes and Gammells became friends, and young George W. Bush's first trip to Britain came in 1959, when he stayed at the Gammells' Scottish estate outside Perth. Young George W. became friends with young Bill Gammell, and the friendship, as the Bush family's friendships usually do, endured; he flew to Gammell's wedding in Scotland in 1983. Gammell attended the elite Scottish school of Fettes, where he befriended a young Tony Blair, and later became an important donor to the Blair campaign funds. When Gammell opened a new headquarters for his thriving Cairn Energy (which has recently struck it very rich in India), Prime Minister Blair cut the opening ribbon. When most observers on both sides of the Atlantic reckoned that Bush's election would end that special personal relationship that Blair had enjoyed with the White House, Gammell was able to reassure both Bush and Blair that they would and should be friends.

The Schweizer book, which appears well sourced and had the benefit of sixty hours of interviews with the extended Bush family and another forty hours with close family friends, gives the most complete account so far of the current President Bush's journey to his religious faith. They note one pivotal moment when he joined a Bible study group in Midland on Monday evenings, which meant giving up the local masculine rite of Monday night football. In one exchange, another member of the group was complaining of how tough it had been growing up as the son of a preacher; George retorted that was nothing compared to growing up in the shadow of a vice president. The weight of family expectations, with its tradition of success and fierce competition, must have been daunting. And just as he took refuge from the family's patrician tradition in a countrified Texan persona at Yale and at Harvard Business School--where he carried a paper cup to class for his spitting tobacco--so he seems to have found another kind of relief from family pressure first in drinking, and then in the religion that broke his drinking habit. Billy Graham played a central role, and at one point when Bush was arguing with his mother that Jesus Christ was the only way to salvation, Barbara Bush went to the source and telephoned the preacher. Bush's faith appears to be plain and profound, an essential step in overcoming his long devotion to what the young man called his "four Bs"--beer, bourbon and B&B (brandy and Benedictine).

The Schweizer book is a classic family biography, reliable and thorough, cautious in its judgments, and not deterred by the family's help with their research from probing some of the more tense periods, like the at least briefly ugly rivalry between the two political heirs, George W. and Jeb Bush. W. himself has spoken of his pain when he announced that he was running for Governor of Texas and his family laughed. He has also suggested a sense of grievance that his parents preferred Jeb. On the night that he won his Texas race and Jeb lost Florida, W. noted, "their heads may have been in Austin, but their hearts were in Tallahassee."

Jeb's turn may yet come. This is indeed a dynasty in the Kennedy mold, and perhaps the Clintons may yet follow, since the name recognition, the family connections and the political comitatus that tends to gather around such proven winners are distinct assets in American democracy. Indeed, it does not take much imagination to see a kind of War of the Roses developing in American politics, if Hillary Clinton follows W. and Jeb then follows Hillary and young Chelsea awaits her turn at the family inheritance. The occasional rebellion from the Kennedy or Cuomo and Bayh clans among the Democrats would fit neatly into the 15thcentury English pattern. (The grand Republican bloodlines of Tarts and Lodges seem to be exhausted; perhaps the rich mix of Kennedy and Schwarzenegger genes may yet give the GOP a rival to the Bush dynasty.)

The Schweizers conclude,

   In a world where political fundraising drives
   media coverage, which in turn drives national
   attention, even popular figures in the GOP
   cannot help but feel that they are a small
   merchant shop up against Wal-Mart.

It is an arresting and thoughtful metaphor, except that the essence of Wal-Mart is to be everywhere and to appeal to mass markets, whereas the Bushes have proved a somewhat divisive breed. Bush 41 managed to split the Republican Party; Bush 43 has proved to be a remarkably polarizing president. Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute cites polls that suggest Bush has broken all records in splitting the country: among Republican voters, 91 percent approve of Bush's performance, but only 17 percent of Democrats. The resulting "polarization index" of 74 percent is the widest since such polls began.

THE LAST two books reviewed here suggest that the Bush family may yet pay a price for its ability to forge friendships outside the realm. Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud starts with the now-familiar story of the Bin Laden family being rushed out the country immediately after the September 11 attacks, when other aircraft were grounded. He goes on in considerable and often wearisome detail to describe the family connections with oil and the Arabs, from the 1960s, when Bush 41's Zapata company built Kuwait's first offshore oil well, to the 1990s when Bush 43's Harken company escaped its difficulties with investments that seem to have been connected to the infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce International, and then the tiny Harken was able to beat the giant Amoco corporation to win exclusive offshore drilling rights in Bahrain.

"Never before has an American President been so closely tied to a foreign power that harbors and supports our country's mortal enemies", Unger concludes. In an appendix, he spells out what he suggests is a billion-dollar connection, a total of $1,477,100,000, which he says are

   financial transactions through which individuals
   and entities connected with the
   House of Saud transferred money to individuals
   and entities closely connected to the
   House of Bush.

Unger casts his net very wide, but the vast bulk of this money, over $1.2 billion, is attributed to the Carlyle Group, for which Bush 41 is a consultant. The Bin Laden family were early investors in Carlyle. Another $180 million is attributed to Halliburton; $25 million is said to be the financing of Harken, and a final puny $3.5 million is listed as "charitable donations." They are $1 million from King Fahd to Barbara Bush's literacy campaign, $1 million from Prince Bandar to the Elder Bush's Presidential Library, plus another $1 million oil painting of a buffalo hunt, also to the Bush Library, and a $500,000 scholarship to Bush's old school, Andover, donated by Prince Talal.

What does one make of this, given that one of Unger's stories, of another Saudi evacuation flight after 9/11, has itself been discredited by the 9/11 Commission? It does not seem to prove a great deal beyond the astuteness of Saudi investors, the ability of the Carlyle Group and Halliburton to use their contacts and skills to make money, and the intelligence of the Saudis in directing their charity to maximum effect. The rich around the world share what a Marxist would call a class interest. They want to protect their money and to make more of it, and powerful and influential Americans profitably cooperated with the Saudis to their mutual benefit. For Unger--whose familiarity with Saudi history, the Wahhabis, Islam and the al-Saud family seems but half-digested from secondary sources--all this amounts to a great scandal

It can be put more simply. The United States wants Saudi oil and also wants access to the money the Saudis get for it. The Saudis want protection, and the Americans are happy to provide it. The Saudis have also sought protection from their own Islamic militants, which they first secured by buying them off. But then when the Americans asked the Saudis to help finance and support the jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, a period when the Carter and Reagan Administrations were supporting the young volunteer Osama bin Laden, Americans and Saudis alike created a sorcerer's apprentice, a dangerous tool they could no longer control. And within the obvious political constraints of Saudi politics, they are now cooperating to destroy that threat to them both, and not making a very impressive job of it.

AT LEAST Unger sticks to the Saudis. Kevin Phillips, a first-rate historian (The Cousins' Wars) and the brilliant political analyst who predicted and defined The Emerging Republican Majority back in 1968, covers the global waterfront in his vendetta against the Bush family. This book is not an easy read, and Phillips, for all the credit he has built up with his previous work, began to lose this reader when he delved deeply into comparisons between the rise of the Bush dynasty and the restoration of European royal houses. He found it particularly sinister that the ancestors of some of those seeking to be restored to their thrones these days had fascist links in the 1930s and 1940s. This way madness lies.

Phillips takes the rise of the Bush family dynasty as a personal affront and a mockery of the grand republican principles of meritocracy. He sees in their CIA connections the shadowy influence of the national security state, and makes much of Bush 41's term as CIA director (and possibly as a CIA asset in his time running Zapata), and of his father. Senator Prescott Bush, Phillips writes, "of Yale, Skull and Bones, and Brown Brothers Harriman, was an off-the-books eminence grise, a Man Who Could Be Trusted, perhaps even a shadow CIA Director."

The evidence of Prescott Bush's intelligence connections--other than being a member in good standing of the New York financial establishment, a member of Yale's Skull and Bones club, and a friend of the Dulles family--is thin. (What evidence there is points to him having even closer connections to British Intelligence, with one source claiming Prescott had been "trained by Stewart Menzies, later head of the British secret service during World War II.") Phillips makes much of Prescott Bush's financial connections with Nazi Germany before 1941, through Brown Brothers Harriman, a banking house which also worked closely with Soviet Russia--thus confirming the obvious, that money is money, and can be made in the most unsavory places. Like Bush 41 with the Carlyle group (which trades in weaponry, among other things), Prescott (and George Herbert Walker, described by Phillips as "the founding father and spiritual progenitor of the Bush clan") were connected to the arms trade, through the Remington Arms group, Union Banking Corporation, the Hamburg-Amerika shipping line and so on.

>From these various connections, which are not exactly unusual for international banking houses, Phillips sees a monstrous precursor of Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex", complete with Nazi gold and Soviet oil. His shotgun scattering of guilt by association can get confusing: it is not clear whether Phillips is trying to imply that Prescott Bush was a covert Nazi, a British agent, a Soviet cat's-paw, all three, or just a ruthless and ambitious American financier making contacts and money wherever he could. Phillips goes on to cover much of the same ground as Unger on the Saudi connection, and concludes somewhat over-heatedly that the republic is in danger:

   National governance has, at least temporarily,
   moved away from the proven tradition
   of a leader chosen democratically, by a
   majority or plurality of the electorate, to the
   succession of a dynastic heir whose unfortunate
   inheritance is privileged, covert, and
   globally embroiling.

WHATEVER VIEW one takes of the messy outcome of the 2000 election, Bush is hardly an illegitimate president. He has been sworn to the office with the blessing of the Supreme Court, the body constitutionally empowered to resolve the unfortunate difficulties that attended the Florida vote (which he clearly won in the official and unofficial recount process). He has the backing of Congress and has a good chance of being re-elected. The safeguards of the Constitution, along with the unwritten traditions of the British system, mean that if Anglo-American voters want to evict Bush and Blair for leading them into dubious battle, they can do so. The same freedoms that protect the American republic and the British kingdom also protect the rights of Phillips and Unger to produce the kind of woolly and malevolent tosh now under review.

It may be significant that Unger's publishers decided not to issue his book in Britain, where the libel laws are a great deal less forgiving. It may also be significant that Unger's book has no reference to Blair nor to Margaret Thatcher, which seems curious in a book about the Saudi connection, when the British fought two wars in the region in alliance with successive Bush presidents. Phillips has one passing reference to Blair and three to Thatcher, only one of which is useful. He cites her urging Bush to go to war at Aspen in 1990 for political reasons: "George, I was about to be defeated in England when the Falklands conflict happened. I stayed in office for eight years after that." Characteristically, Phillips does not ask the obvious question: If Bush was so locked into the Saudi connection, why did he need Thatcher to stop him going wobbly?

One final anecdote from the admirable Stothard-Stephens books may help to put the personal qualities and the relationship of the current president and prime minister into a useful perspective. Bush, it is no secret, is no admirer of Bill Clinton, the man who defeated his father, and in Bush's phrase "dishonored" the White House. So when Clinton offered to write an op-ed article for a British newspaper, to appear on the morning of the crucial vote on the Iraq War in the House of Commons, Blair judged that courtesy and protocol required him to ask whether this open letter of support for Blair from the last president would be a problem for the current one. Not in the least, Bush replied: an excellent idea.

(1) However, when one looks at fixed investment, the pattern is markedly different, with Britain by far the largest foreign investor in the United States, and vice versa. Almost a fifth of U.S. overseas investment goes to Britain, more than three times that to France and Germany combined. More than a million Brits work for U.S. affiliates in Britain, compared to some 200,000 Chinese working for U.S. affiliates in China.

Martin Walker is editor-in-chief of United Press International.

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