Kevin Phillips is no hotheaded bomb-thrower but a seasoned wise man with deep roots in the Republican party. Nonetheless, his new book on the Bush family is more incendiary than the Bill-Clinton-murdered-Vince-Foster books so popular during the '90s. Unlike them, however, American Dynasty is not sensationalistic and its claims are historically verifiable.

Phillips' The Emerging Republican Majority (1969), was a bible for the party faithful that predicted the successful Sun Belt-dominated rise of the GOP. But, since 1990, with the publication of The Politics of Rich and Poor, Phillips has become more and more alarmed over the divergence of wealth and social position in the United States. His Wealth and Democracy (2002) was a clarion call, warning that democracy and economic polarization can't coexist.

American Dynasty extends that analysis, centering on the family Phillips calls "the House of Bush" and telling the story of four generations of Bushes from World War I up to the ongoing Iraq conflict.

Phillips examines at length the current president's grandfather Prescott Bush (and Prescott's father-in-law, George Herbert Walker). Prescott, Phillips writes, tried to duck his family's "aura of wealth" when he ran for the Senate: "He had tried to minimize the connotations of his rich-family, Wall Street resume by seeming less stuffy and emphasizing his involvement in charitable, educational, and civil rights causes."

And, Phillips makes clear, successive generations of political Bushes also masqueraded as the common man. For those who have paid keen attention to the career of George W. Bush, a lot of the facts in American Dynasty are not news, however startling. But it is Phillips' training as a historian and the context he provides that makes his book so fresh and damning.

Phillips admits to being aghast at what he discovered: "[I]n examining two Bush presidencies and a four-generation pursuit of national prominence and power through an unusual lens -- one that highlighted elite associations, recurring political practices, and dynastic ambitions -- I learned much more, and I admit to being shocked at some of what I found. The result is an unusual and unflattering portrait of a great family (in power, not morality) that has built a base over the course of the twentieth century in the back corridors of the new military-industrial complex and in close association with the growing national security establishment. In doing so, the family has threaded its way through damning political and armaments scandals and, since the 1980s, faint hints, never more, of acts that in another climate might have led to presidential impeachment."

Phillips seems most exercised by two things: the first being that the Bush family's wealth and power comes principally from the investment communities, oil being just a paper holding to them, not a tangible thing that produces something other than profit, and the second that this interest has been forever entwined with government intelligence work. The present Bushes, son and father, might live in Texas, but their family oil and business interests are in the Middle East and the Caribbean.

The combination of the intelligence community and international corporations produced what amounted to a government within a government, which is now becoming one and the same thing, Phillips writes. "No previous presidential family has been so wholeheartedly involved with a single economic sector over two generations, yet with so little scrutiny of the resulting narrowness of its public policy views. If representing Texas for ten or twenty years stamped a senator's or congressman's view of the national agenda, what would have been imprinted on a presidential family by a century of working to increase the wealth of a small slice of Upper America?" Hence George W. Bush's need to eliminate the "death tax," the tax on dividends, etc.

The involvement of Prescott Bush and his father-in-law with Nazi-era German holding companies became useful resources for the CIA during the Cold War. The interlocking directorships and the Bush contacts with the Yale graduates who made up a good part of the East Coast investment and political establishment, became, over time, a permanent power base. Phillips shows how "crony capitalism" is not new but has been the basis for business in the Bush family for nearly 100 years.

When George H.W. Bush was elected president in 1988, many Americans were unaware that he had been head of the CIA. Fewer understood that that method of ascendancy to the Oval Office was unheard of in American history. Most didn't give it much thought, but if they had, they would find troubling Phillips' recounting of the Bush family history and the history of the CIA. Phillips' examination of the personnel of the second Bush White House is proof of how small a world that is.

American Dynasty revisits many national traumas through the direct involvement of the Bushes: the Kennedy assassination, Cuba, Nicaragua, the arms-for-hostages controversy, the Iran-Iraq war, the current Iraq conflict. This steady march of history and Phillips' marshaling of evidence has cumulative power. None of the other recent critical, liberal books about George W. Bush has this sort of sweep or impact.

Phillips doesn't neglect the simple fact that Bill Clinton impeded the rise of the House of Bush and the 2000 election almost thwarted its restoration: "... Clinton's moral shortcomings and impeachment may have been a precondition for Bush's accession in 2000. Even so, the speed and seriousness of the family's efforts to make George W. Bush governor of Texas in 1994 and to likewise for his brother in Florida more than hinted at its higher goals."

Phillips points out how the anger that drove the impeachment of Bill Clinton may have worn the public face of rural congressmen and right-wing talk radio, but actually was fueled by the grievances of the Bush family and its circle of highly placed establishment figures. The Clinton destruction crew (the "vast right-wing conspiracy") was highly successful deceptive branding, letting the parochial members of Congress take the heat for the excesses of the Clinton-haters.

This deep-seated anger carried over to the contested 2000 election. The Republicans fought a no-holds-barred battle, feeding off eight years of rage at the Clinton usurpation; Al Gore did much less, feeling equivocal at best because of Clinton's failings and worrying about the legitimacy of the presidency being weakened if he protested too much.

But this issue is a sideshow to the main event, the depiction of the rise of the Bush dynasty and how dynasties are antithetical to democratic systems. American Dynasty is so sober and steeped in learning that readers will wonder how President Bush, or any man's family, could stand this depth of exposure. Most likely Phillips will be attacked by the same machinery that so effectively pummeled Bill Clinton. American Dynasty is as depressing as it is brilliant and important.

POLITICS: AMERICAN DYNASTY - ARISTOCRACY, FORTUNE, AND THE POLITICS OF DECEIT IN THE HOUSE OF BUSH BY KEVIN PHILLIPS Viking. $25.95.

http://www.suntimes.com/output/books/sho-sunday-phillips18.html