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That's not to defend Hatfield's dishonesty (or his sloppy, unbelievable sourcing, should the tale be true). It's just to note that none of the three Bush biographies now out -- including his autobiography -- has succeeded in penetrating his mildly charismatic, militantly unreflective averageness, to fill in the blanks in his past and explain how this under-accomplished son of privilege amassed a $100 million campaign war chest a year before the 2000 election, making the American presidency his to lose.

Bill Minutaglio's "First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty" is by far the best of the lot, but that's not saying much. All the books cover much the same ground: George Herbert Walker and Barbara Bush leaving the Eastern elite and lighting out for Texas; George the elder's absence from the family as he attempts to make his own way in the oil industry independently (starting out with a job his father got for him, of course); George W.'s sister Robin's tragic death at 4, when he was 7; the party years at Andover and Yale (friends from those days thought Bush was the model for John Belushi's Bluto in "Animal House"); the notorious "nomadic years" of the early '70s.

Then came the putative "entrepreneurial" years, when Bush returned to his dad's Midland, Texas, oil roots and got family and friends to help him fail ever upward. Eventually he turned his investment in the aptly named, money-losing Arbusto Energy into a million-dollar stake in a much bigger firm and ponied up about $600,000 for a tiny share of the Texas Rangers baseball team, which was worth almost $15 million when he sold it last year. (To be fair, maybe the books explain more than I've given them credit for. Because if your life worked out this dang well, you might wanna run for president, too.)

Like a lot of reporters before and since, Minutaglio and Hatfield spend much time scouring the record to find out how Bush made all that money. (Bush's own book blithely ignores such questions.) They dutifully -- and in Hatfield's case breathlessly -- cite the controversies: the lawsuits and the Security and Exchange Commission investigations, the links to people connected to unsavory Saudi investors. But none of his critics have ever pinned him with any crime, or even any clear-cut breach of business ethics. He apparently made his money the old-fashioned way: He got some from his family, and made the rest thanks to the kindness of wealthy friends -- or strangers who wanted to be his friends.

These books are less useful as biographies of our would-be president than as primers in American privilege. But as such, they're very useful. Bush, like Reagan, stands for the open defense of inherited status and power, of the rights of people like us to run the world because people like us have always run it -- a kind of affirmative action for the white and wealthy that was challenged, to Bush's chagrin, in the 1960s and 1970s, but began its rehabilitation under Reagan in the 1980s. The next election could be a plebiscite on the notion of dynasty vs. meritocracy -- but only if Bush faces someone other than Vice President Al Gore, similarly privileged and protected from the need to be self-reliant.

And yet, to his advantage, Bush has a shadowy romance with the non-white and non-wealthy that accounts for his political success. He's in touch with the basic optimism of low-income and minority folks, with their aversion to being treated like victims, as well as their instinctive sympathy for a black sheep like George W. His pedigree makes him dynasty material; his flaws make him interesting to the rest of us. If he can integrate both, he'll be president, and he might then even be a good one. But judging from the contents of these books, it's not clear that he can hang onto all parts of his complex past as he moves into his overdetermined future.

Next page | The tragedy that marred George W.'s childhood