Bush is like attending the funeral of an old boss and hearing from other people that, really, he wasn’t such a bad guy … but he wasn’t that great a boss, either. Whereas Hillary was a deeply personal documentary made in close partnership with Madam Secretary herself, American Experience has followed its time-honored approach - usually applied to dead presidents - of editorial independence, not interviewing W but instead letting journalists, historians, and insiders of varying degrees of loyalty tell the story of his somewhat improbable rise to power.Īnd while watching Hillary (for me anyway) is like having a long dinner with an old friend and slowly remembering why you two aren’t close anymore, watching George W. Bush, a two-night, four-hour recap of the Bush 43 presidency. And starting Monday, PBS’s long-running history franchise American Experience weighs in with George W. In March we had the four-part Hillary docuseries from Hulu. Now, in the course of a single pandemic, we’ve gotten two exhaustive made-for-TV chronicles of that distant epoch when we were all supposedly infatuated with the families Bush and Clinton.
Our love of dynasties was killing democracy … until it wasn’t.
Hard to believe now, but our fragile republic was fighting off not one but two potentially fatal infections - Regnum bushis and Regnum clintonis. “What makes the Bush family so different - and, in many ways, so dangerous - is that they’ve created a dynasty,” Phillips explained to Rolling Stone’s interviewer (who, typical of the book’s ga-ga coverage at the time, failed to bring up Adams 2 or 6 or their extensive political patrilineage). Way back in 2004, Kevin Phillips wrote a huge bestseller called American Dynasty, outlining the threat of having two men from the same family serving as President of the United States.
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