Review: Mark Updegrove’s The Last Republicans takes a measured look at the Bush family

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One of the effects of the ascendancy of Donald Trump – who wants to erase the North American free-trade agreement, erase the Trans-Pacific Partnership, erase the Iran nuclear deal, erase the Paris climate accord, erase open borders, erase Obamacare, erase environmental regulations – is that his 10 months in the White House have also erased history.

The result is that the Bush family (whose two presidencies were only a quarter-century ago, a mere hiccup in time) and the Bush ethos (service above all, sprinkled with gentility, marked by deference and adherence to "harmony" and a sense of "nobility," terms the first president Bush employed in his inaugural address) seem to inhabit a distant past, more of the world of Franklin Roosevelt, perhaps even of Woodrow Wilson, than of today, an epoch that is nasty and brutish and, more frightening still, perhaps not short.

That is why Mark Updegrove's mild and measured – two words that seem to have dropped out of regular use in the era of the Trump tweet – book seems as if it's an excursion to a land faraway and a time forgotten. The father sends notes to his sons speaking of "a family that loves each other" and asserting that he is "very proud and devoted," the presidential son leaves a note for his successor speaking of "a country that is pulling for you, including me." The first President Bush is remembered for the phrase "kinder and gentler," the second for "compassionate conservatism." It all seems so long ago.

To be sure, the Tolstoy principle can be adapted and applied to the Bush family as well: All families are alike, in having flaws. This family had ambition, and fought campaigns with harshness that traduced their kinder, gentler idiom, and they mangled the English language, sometimes beyond respectability and recognition. And for all the revisionism – and nothing has benefited the junior President Bush in the public eye so much as the Trump presidency, which has lent George W. Bush a rime of respectability that he struggled to win in the White House – the second Iraq War remains a wound on the American body politic.

Even so, the two Bushes – George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, separated in office only by the exhausting eight years of Bill Clinton – represent the last of a breed and, if Updegrove is to be believed, represent the last Republicans. The phrase that the onetime director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library appropriates for his title comes from "W." himself, and recent events suggest it is appropriate. The current occupant of the White House has a surfeit of riches but a paucity of refinement – and won the nomination of the Republican Party but has no adherence to the Republican Party, which for most of its century-and-a-half history has been a party of steady habits, whispery rhetoric and fealty to tradition. You'll see none of that on Pennsylvania Avenue right now.

In chronicling the passage of what he calls "the most consequential father-son relationship in America's history," Updegrove has produced a dual biography that bounces between the 41st and 43rd presidents but that, above all, gives us perspective on the 45th. Nos. 41 and 43 prized chivalry, while No. 45 repudiates it. The previous two Republican presidents courted traditional allies, Canada principally among them, while the current Republican President repudiates decades of cultivated mutual respect. And so forth.

Yet, this is not a book about Donald Trump but about the two George Bushes, and indeed readers may find the Bush age soothing: A son in awe of his father, a father bursting with pride (although sometimes astonishment) at his son. A father in mourning for his little girl, dead of leukemia at age 3, a young brother wondering where, if the Earth were indeed spinning on its axis, his beloved little sister had gone. A father the very portrait of rectitude, a son constantly getting caught smoking. A father who believed deeply in hierarchy, a son who drew a beard and mustache on a picture of the school principal.

But both were educated at Phillips Andover – think Upper Canada College, only in Massachusetts – where the motto is Non sibi, Latin for "Not for Self." H.W. took it naturally (and seriously), W. came around to understand it, and then to be guided by it, although not until he stopped drinking. His new-found religious fervour contributed to a process that left him more in the mould of H.W. than either would acknowledge until later: sober, selfless, secure. "His transformation as he crossed into middle age," Updegrove writes, "was an attempt to be a worthier member" of the Bush family. The story of the Bush family is in large measure the story of a vital period in American history – the influence of the CIA, the Nixon debacle, the Reagan years, the fall of the Soviet bloc, the American preoccupation with Iraq leading to two wars, the age of terror, an overtime election, the financial crash. For all the attention paid to the Kennedy family (one president, three senators, three House members), and in earlier years to the Adamses (two presidencies, one vice-presidency, one House member), the Bushes (two presidencies, one vice-presidency, two governors, one senator, one House member) now are America's pre-eminent political family.

Many of the juicier elements of this volume – the family's contempt for Trump, and its refusal to vote for him last November – have been well aired in the media. If there is any surprise between these covers, it is in the prominent role the younger Bush played in the elder Bush's 1988 presidential campaign. This has been discussed elsewhere but is fleshed out fully in these pages: "Junior quickly learned how far to push his father, and when to back off and defer to his judgment." This is a lesson most of us learn, usually too late.

David Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and a frequent contributor to The Globe and Mail's Opinion pages.