It's this talent, slightly nerdy and invaluable, that piqued the curiosity of Nixon. The presidential candidate heard Phillips expound on how Republicans could reach southern working-class whites and northern Catholics who had been turned off by the Democratic Party's turn to the cultural and social left. "I argued that there were a lot of white ethnics for whom a vote for [John F.] Kennedy was a last hurrah," Phillips recalls.
Nixon hammered at these themes and took key border states in his 1968 election. Nixon sent Phillips to work as a political aide for Attorney General John Mitchell, but Phillips didn't care for much of the Nixon crowd -- H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman deep-sixed most of the young aide's ideas. But he developed an enduring fondness for his strangely awkward president. Nixon was an inchoate man after Phillips's own heart.
"I've never understood why we take Bush and his family seriously," says Kevin Phillips, who quit the GOP to become an independent.
(Helayne Seidman For The Washington Post)
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"Nixon only liked first-generation millionaires, the guys who had four car dealerships in Los Angeles," Phillips says. "He probably wanted to get into the private golf clubs, but he always knew it would be an uphill struggle."
Phillips left the Nixon White House after about a year. While his writing remained influential within Republican circles for the next decade, he never became a political consultant. Instead he has written 11 well-respected books on history and economics, and made a considerable pile of money writing business newsletters and giving speeches on politics. "I've done well with Bush-o-nomics, no doubt," he says. "Unfortunately, it's disastrous for the country."
Phillips's antipathy for the Bushes took root in the Nixon administration. Nixon, he says, regarded the elder Bush as a lightweight and so assigned him to the United Nations. Nixon then appointed him as chairman of the Republican National Committee, where Bush proved swell at sweet-talking donors into parting with large sums of money for the sake of the party. (In this way, Phillips says, the father prefigured the son. George W. Bush never ran a profitable oil business, but he was terrific at raising copious sums of finance capital and walked away from each oil venture with a fatter bank account).
In the end, though, it's not the money that most galls Phillips, nor even the unseemly origins of the Bush fortune. (Earlier generations of Bushes apparently profited handsomely from World War I contracts and from the reckless lending of bonds to a collapsing Weimar Republic government, not to mention some Bush-Harriman investments in Germany as it rearmed during the 1930s.) Phillips is too much the scholar not to know that scoundrels stand behind most great fortunes.
What bothers him is that generation after generation of Bushes are so unwilling to transcend their class interests.
"An old buccaneer and bootlegger like Joe Kennedy became an SEC head for Roosevelt and cracked down on his own class," Phillips says, adding: "The Bush family would just appoint a Gucci-shoe-licking sycophant. The family has simply developed a culture of being enormously supportive of their class."
Even the president's Texas twang grates on Phillips, whose own accent is clipped and clear and, we must note, a tad patrician. "Listen to them! Assemble the very best panel of linguists you could find and have them listen to brothers Jeb and G.W. -- they wouldn't even guess they're in the same family," Phillips says. "G.W. talks like a cowboy and he's no more a backwoods Texan than I am."
So what's an Nixon-Eisenhower Republican to do when he steps inside a voting booth in November 2004? Phillips shrugs. As it stands, Kerry has his vote, although the text of Phillips's endorsement probably won't appear in any Democratic ads. "I'm hoping that Kerry's a seven on a scale of 10, but I'm afraid maybe he's just a five," Phillips says. "But Kerry's running against a zero. So my choice is clear."
