The Quiet Dynasty

Monday, Aug. 07, 2000 By MICHAEL DUFFY AND NANCY GIBBS

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George W. Bush wasn't officially notified that the White House was haunted until after his dad was elected President in 1988. He was sitting around the transition office with his aide Doug Wead, thinking about how much fun they had had during the campaign. "So what happens now?" Bush asked. Wead wondered if Bush would be interested in what becomes of Presidents' kids. Sure, said Bush, and Wead and his team went to work. They came back a few weeks later with a 44-page study that was so dark it might have been titled "The Curse," classified top secret and filed away forever, because none of it was promising for someone who was suddenly weighing his own future in politics.

The report detailed how Presidents' kids had a tendency to become drunks or get sick, have an accident or die young. Many of them gave their lives over to defending their fathers in history. Some quit their jobs or couldn't hold them; some couldn't get it together at all. George Washington Adams, the son of John Quincy Adams, is thought to have committed suicide at 28. Others walked away from colleges and universities, or they wrote bad papers and gave lectures about why Martin van Buren was right to oppose annexing Texas. Sixteen made it to Congress, but none had been elected Governor. Bush groaned when he heard that.

You could take it as a measure of his courage or his indifference to history that George W. Bush would even imagine that he could take up where his father left off. No one has ever tried a Restoration of the kind before us right now. The Adamses waited 24 years between presidencies, the Harrisons twice that long. But only eight years have passed since voters tossed a Bush out of office, and they have been eight years of rampaging prosperity. Al Gore has plenty of time to argue that going back to the future would be unwise or unreal. But it is remarkable that he is having to make his case against the son of the man he and Bill Clinton exiled. "It is time for them to go," Gore chanted famously at the convention in New York in 1992. Is it already time for them to come back?

On the surface, the Bushes seem the least likely family to lunge for a Restoration. By every appearance, they lack the Roosevelts' intensity or the Kennedys' unembarrassed ambition. Yet they are poised to surpass them all. Theirs is the Quiet Dynasty, the one that loves to surprise, that never shows its hand. Like old money, its assets are something it doesn't discuss in public. Instead the Bushes speak of service, as in, "We're just so glad our sons decided to follow us into public service"--and it's not insincere, because they are glad. The Bush code is not really about power; it is about winning and achieving, doing your best, better than the other guy. For them, dynasty is a fighting word, and it's no wonder, with its embedded insult of unfair advantage. "Dynasty means something inherited," W. told TIME. "We inherited a good name, but you don't inherit a vote. You have to win a vote."