OPINION:
THE LAST REPUBLICANS: INSIDE THE EXTRAORDINARY RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GEORGE H.W. BUSH AND GEORGE W. BUSH
By Mark K. Updegrove
Harper, $29.99, 496 pages
The title of the new book by historian Mark K. Updegrove, “The Last Republicans,” about presidents George H.W. Bush (41) and George W. Bush (43) is in and of itself intriguing.
Possibly it was conceived before the election of the new Republican president, Donald Trump, or was it afterwards and done so to make a point? A lot of commentators on the right and the left have questioned the political and ideological credentials of President Trump — once a longtime Democrat, often even now sounding like a liberal — as opposed to the Republicans-for-life Bushes.
The book is organized chronologically, which is how history should be written. “History is lived forwards but it is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only,” once said author C.V. Wedgewood. The research is impressive including extensive contact with both the subjects of the book as well as other important figures of the era including James A. Baker and Condoleezza Rice. He also had an impressive group of historians to call upon for advice including Douglas Brinkley and Jon Meacham.
Mr. Updegrove had to have far-reaching interaction with Bush 43 to get him to tell readers he once chased a lot of women and “drank a lot of whiskey.” He is certainly not the first former president to undertake such endeavors in his youth, just the first to admit it. There are nice historical touchstones to John and John Quincy Adams — the only other father-son team to be so elected. Mr. Updegrove quickly establishes himself as a master of his subject matter, and he has the knack for taking on sensitive and controversial subjects such as Bush 43’s drinking or the dumb rumors about Bush 41’s affair frankly and thoroughly, but without judgment.
There are also nice, heretofore-unknown or underreported anecdotes, such as the months in which Lt. Bush stood watch on the submarine Finback after his plane was shot down and he was miraculously picked up by the American sub.
Mr. Updegrove has a long association with the LBJ Library and thus presumably a man of the left, but this does not emerge in how he approaches the Bushes. (Indeed, this book is more than just about two men, it is also about Barbara, Jeb and the patriarch, Prescott Bush.) What’s also refreshing is despite whatever political views Mr. Updegrove holds, they do not make it into the book. Too many liberals now are rewriting conservative history to push their own ideology. This book defies my concerns that liberals should not be allowed to record conservative history.
The author tells us “theirs is a love story” and it seems true, but what is also true is the book is mostly a personal history, not an entirely complete account of their political, philosophical or governing history. It is certainly not romantic in the way many writers have treated George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, JFK and Ronald Reagan.
But the Bushes themselves were not romantic and often made fun of that approach, as if they needed to buck up their manhood though neither needed to do so. They certainly both said so in public many times. The author does veer off a couple of times into the “psychobabble” of the father-son dynamic and its “Hamlet” overtones. But not too much as to be distracting, summing it to be a “mystery.”
Mr. Updegrove leaves out some important, event-changing tales in the saga of the Bushes He overlooks the fight-to-the-death struggle over amnesty for illegal aliens between Bush 43 and the reemerging conservative movement under the guise of the Tea Party. But the Tea Party Mr. Updegrove labels “extremists.”
The scholarship on Mr. Reagan is a bit uneven, such as suggesting that Sen. Bob Dole and Mr. Reagan did not get along, which was not true. Actually, they were quite fond of each other in part because Mr. Reagan was a sucker for war heroes and because Mr. Reagan had grown up poor, in the Midwest, just like Mr. Dole.
His history of the Nashua Debate is thin. All one has to do is study Mr. Reagan’s speeches — many extemporaneous — in the last years of his presidency to see how vibrant and engaged he really was. The author touches on but does not sufficiently explore the animosities between the Bushes and the Reagans, some of it fueled by the wives.
Most of these small criticisms on balance are so much eyewash, however. This is a very good book, an honest and clear-eyed look at a controversial and conflicted family,
Mr. Updegrove is a first-rate historian and the “The Last Republicans” is a worthy, straightforward and honest addition to the Bush legacy and Bush family history. It is much more than the “Gentlemen’s C” that both Bushes sometimes earned at Yale.
• Craig Shirley is a presidential historian and the author of four books about Ronald Reagan.
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