A Detour Into Prescott Bush

Over the holidays, my wife and I added The Bourne Legacy, the fourth episode of the Hollywood franchise loosely based on Robert Ludlum novels, to our collection of DVDs. My fascination with the series was one of the reasons I started this blog, as I outlined in this early post:

The original Ludlum novels appeared between 1980 and 1990, while the film trilogy we watched appeared between 2002 and 2007, long before Donald Trump was anything but a playboy billionaire and reality TV star. Yet the image of the CIA and its fictional director, Martin Marshall, is the one we have now, the one with the actual CIA director John Brennan, who in the public mind is fully capable of Martin Marshall's misdeeds and fully eligible for Marshall's implied fate, federal indictment for serious whatever. Did Martin Marshall go to Yale? You betcha.

The MacGuffin of the Bourne franchise, the element that's necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, is a set of deep-state programs that deploys mentally reprogrammed or chemically enhanced agents who operate extralegally to assassinate problem people, who tend to be idealistic humanitarians with inconvenient views. Jason Bourne, the central figure, is one such agent, who loses his memory when he's nearly killed in an operation, and in the course of regaining it, he discovers his role in the program and sets out to expose it.

This view of a world dominated by clandestine agencies operating outside the bounds of law strikes me as a remarkable paradigm for our recent history, as Democrat Leader Charles Schumer commented on the eve of Trump's first inauguration, “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you.” I began to pursue this idea again yesterday as I ruminated on the remarkable obtuseness of Walter Russell Mead when he characterized George W Bush as a "Jacksonian", a movement that championed greater rights for the common man and was opposed to any signs of aristocracy in the nation.

There's also the troublesome problem of both Dubya's and his father's close association with neoconservative foreign policy. Mead himself calls Bush pere a "Hamiltonian", which supposedly favors international commerce and institutions, as opposed to Dubya's Jacksonianism, but the foreign policies of both Presidents Bush strike me as completely congruent, based on prominent foreign military interventions in undeclared wars, variously in Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Panama.

Trying to draw a distinction between a "Hamiltonian" and "Jacksonian" in trying to explain this is simply misleading. Jason Bourne understands recent history better than Walter Russell Mead; it's based on a clandestine-service deep state with interventionist instincts that appears to have evolved between World War I and the Cold War, with milestones including the development of the FBI in the 1920s under J Edgar Hoover, the rise of the OSS during World War II under "Wild Bill" Donovan, which morphed into the CIA (over Truman's strong objection) during the Cold War, most notably under Allen Dulles.

One factor in this history has been he Bush dynasty. Again, this points to Walter Russell Mead's obtuseness in calling Dubya a "Jacksonian"; the Bushes, as much as the Kennedys, are the closest thing we have to an aristocracy. Mead, himself a Yale alumnus like the Bushes, seems completely unconscious of this.

There are also tantalizing references tro intelligence work throughout the Bush family's 20th-century history. Bush pere was CIA Director in 1976-77. His father, Prescott Bush, according to Wikipedia,

served as a field artillery captain with the American Expeditionary Forces (1917–1919) during World War I. He received intelligence training at Verdun, France and was briefly assigned to a staff of French officers.

According to The New Yorker,

In the mid-forties, when Prescott helped fund a project for the Office of Strategic Services, the spy organization staffed and run by his Ivy League associates, the worlds of intelligence and national security opened to the Bush family.

From the perspective of the post-Dubya years, it's worth revisiting the Bush family history and trying to parse out why the Bush family and their loyalists like the Cheneys have aligned themselves so clearly against Trump, and in fact why Trump seems to have grasped instinctively the need to purge the Bush influence from the Republican Party. I'll detour into this.