Bush Clan Poised to Become Major Political Dynasty

And we thought the Kennedys were a big political dynasty.

After eight years of Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower, the glamorous Kennedys stirred the national imagination as they ushered in the New Frontier.

Yet when John F. Kennedy moved into the White House 40 years ago, one brother was not yet attorney general and the other was still too young to run for the Senate. Their father was a former ambassador to Britain.

Today, as George W. Bush takes the oath as America’s 43rd president, among those on hand will be his father, the former president (and son of a senator); his mother, a descendant of another president; and a brother who governs Florida.

But they are merely the most visible members of a dynasty whose reach throughout the 20th century, into the world of finance and big business as well as politics, remains somewhat obscure--largely because the self-effacing Bush clan wants it that way.

On Friday night, with little fanfare, President-elect George W. Bush, his wife, their twin daughters, his parents, his four siblings and their spouses and children piled into Blair House for a slumber party at the government’s official guest house. Tonight, they will move en masse to the White House, just across Pennsylvania Avenue.

By official count, 155 members of the extended Bush family are in town for the inaugural festivities. Many will gather today at the White House after the inaugural parade for a family portrait.

But don’t utter the word “dynasty” around the Bushes. The new president and his kinfolk shun that notion--even if there is no better description of this aristocratic family, now poised to become America’s preeminent political powerhouse.

“It’s a word George W. Bush doesn’t like. To him, it connotes inheritance--smacks of being handed something,” said Bill Minutaglio, author of “First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty.”

He added: “I was saying [dynasty] before he got elected. Now there’s no question.”

During Bush’s first gubernatorial campaign, the candidate “got very defensive” about talk of a political dynasty, Minutaglio recalled, adding that he was struck by the dearth of family information in Bush’s 1999 autobiography, “A Charge to Keep.”

“He always seemed to have a chip on his shoulder about it, which makes me think that he’s thought a lot about it,” Minutaglio said.

Only once before has a son followed his father’s footsteps into the Oval Office.

And while other famous political families have not moved beyond a single state, the Bushes have developed an unprecedented reach that transcends any single state or even region.

“That’s the primary difference between the Bushes and the Adamses, the Harrisons, the Roosevelts and the Kennedys,” said historian Carl Sferrazza Anthony, author of “America’s First Families.”

“The Adamses dominated Massachusetts. The Harrisons and the Tafts dominated Ohio. The Roosevelts dominated New York. The Kennedys dominated Massachusetts,” he noted.

But it’s a different story with the Bushes.

Although Bush the elder had lived in Texas and made a fortune in oil there--and remains a registered voter in Houston--he never shook his image as a New Englander and a “Connecticut Yankee,” Anthony said. After all, all the Bushes continue to “summer” at the family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine.

Now one of his sons, Jeb, is governor of a huge Sunbelt state, while another is about to become the first genuine president from Texas since Lyndon B. Johnson.

“George W. Bush is really the first true Texan in the family,” said Anthony.

The two strands of Bush’s family tree are rooted in America’s heartlands: Columbus, Ohio, and St. Louis, Mo. And before entering politics, many members of the Bush-Walker clan made their mark in business.

“They have been wealthy for a long period of time. And they have been really, really good at being at the industrial or financial thunderclaps of American history,” said Minutaglio.

George W. Bush more or less followed that same arc. After earning an MBA at the Harvard Graduate School of Business, he returned to West Texas, where he grew up, and worked in oil. He did not succeed in that business but later found fame and fortune as an owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team.

Like his ancestors, George W. Bush grew up in a world of privilege that took for granted such accoutrements as prep schools, Ivy League colleges, country clubs and corporate boards.

While the future president was training as an Air National Guard pilot in 1972 at Moody Air Force Base in Valdosta, Ga., then-President Nixon dispatched a plane to fetch Bush for a dinner in Washington with his daughter Tricia.

Bush’s great-grandfather was Samuel P. Bush, president of Buckeye Steel Casting of Columbus, Ohio, which made rail car parts. As an industrialist, he moved in the same circles as the Rockefellers and the Harrimans.

His son, Prescott S. Bush, attended Yale and then became a financier and something of a corporate turnaround artist in St. Louis. There, Prescott Bush met, and later married, Dorothy Walker.

Prescott Bush also was a partner in the prominent banking firm of Brown Bros., Harriman & Co. From 1952 to 1962, he served as a U.S. senator from Connecticut.

Over the years, Prescott Bush has stated that he could trace his family roots to King Henry III, making his son George, the former president, the 13th cousin, twice removed, of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth.

Dorothy Walker’s father was George Herbert Walker, for whom golf’s prestigious Walker Cup is named.

“Bert” Walker, who was active in civic affairs, played a role in bringing the World’s Fair to St. Louis after the turn of the century.

His father owned the largest dry goods wholesaling business west of the Mississippi, and Bert worked for a time in the family business.

Later, Walker founded his own investment firm, G.H. Walker & Co. In addition to creating the Walker Cup in 1923, which continues to pit some of the world’s best amateur golfers against one another, Walker and other family members helped finance and create Madison Square Garden, Belmont Race Track and the New York Mets.

The Bush family’s sprawling, seaside compound in Kennebunkport is on Walker’s point, named after Bert Walker. He once also owned a 10,000-acre plantation in South Carolina.

George Herbert Walker Bush, the former president and son of Prescott Bush and Dorothy Walker, was born in Milton, Mass., and grew up in Greenwich, Conn.

His mother is frequently described as an energetic woman who instilled in the younger generations a keen sense of competition.

Marvin Pierce, father of former First Lady Barbara Bush, was a distant nephew of Franklin Pierce, the nation’s 14th president. His wife, Pauline Robinson, was the daughter of an Ohio Supreme Court justice. Marvin Pierce was vice president of McCall Corp., which published Redbook and McCall’s magazines.

A onetime Manhattan debutante, Barbara Pierce attended an exclusive boarding school in Charleston, S.C.

Bush dynasty watchers eyeing the next generation most often cite George P. Bush as the next likely politician in the family. Now a law student at the University of Texas, he is the son of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and his wife, Columba.

Others point to Jenna and Barbara Bush, the twin daughters of George W. and Laura Bush. They are 19 and first-year college students--Barbara at Yale, Jenna at the University of Texas at Austin.

“There’s no denying the power of a family name in politics,” said Anthony. “It’s almost like a brand name.”