REMEMBER THE ALAMO; ANNALS OF THE PRESIDENCY |
When something important doesn't turn out the way you expected, you go back
to the beginning and try to see if there were clues you missed. In the summer
of 1999, I drove up to Cooperstown, New York, for my first view of George W.
Bush in action as a politician. I thought of it as a trip in the spirit of the
opening scene of "All the King's Men," where Jack Burden goes to see
Willie Stark in a small-town appearance so that he can find out what the fuss
is about. Bush was going to Cooperstown for the induction of Nolan Ryan--Texan,
former Texas Ranger, all-time strikeout leader--into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
He was already in the thick of running for President, so he had other business
to attend to as well; there was a fund-raiser for him in Cooperstown, and he
had a long private discussion with Governor George Pataki that people thought
might be Pataki's Vice-Presidential audition. But he was plainly going out of
his way to make time for Ryan.
Besides the induction ceremony, there was an event in an auditorium for
Bush, Ryan, and the press. Bush ambled onto the stage without a lot of
ceremony. He was wearing a light-colored sports jacket and slacks, and he made
a crack about how Ryan was lucky enough to be able to come out in shorts and sandals.
With evident relief, Bush declared that he wasn't there to talk about
politics--just sports. The main impression he made was of a man who liked
baseball a great deal and admired Nolan Ryan extravagantly. Ryan exemplifies a
certain type of Texas maleness, a type that Bush seems to hold almost in awe,
perhaps because, contrary to perceptions in Blue America, Europe, and places of
that sort, in the Texas context Bush isn't as brawnily masculine as it gets.
(Bush is a guy who hunts doves and quail but not deer.) Ryan is tall, laconic,
devoted to church and family, rural by upbringing and current residence and
urban only by the temporary necessity of playing major-league ball. And tough
as hell.
In answer to a question from the audience, Bush alluded, with a low chuckle,
to what I'd heard from friends in Texas was his favorite Nolan Ryan moment--on
August 4, 1993. Ryan, on the mound at Arlington Stadium, with Bush not far
away, in the owner's box, struck Robin Ventura, of the Chicago White Sox, with a pitch.
Ventura lost his temper and charged the mound. Ryan, who was then forty-six
years old, twenty years Ventura's senior, caught Ventura in a headlock and
delivered six blows to his head and face, from a distance of about six inches,
really whaling the shit out of him. The scene quickly became a canonical bit of
sports video. It's a wonderful example of super-aggressive behavior presenting
itself as a form of self-defense when, strictly speaking, it isn't--Ryan had
started things by hitting Ventura, after all. But Ryan got to be doubly the
hero, slower to anger but also unquestionably physically dominant. Bush, obviously,
loved it. "It was a fantastic experience for the Texas Rangers fans," he said.
A couple of months later, Bush made another sports-flavored trip to the
Northeast. On a weekend when he had been invited to appear at the California
Republican Party convention, in Orange County, Bush, to the mystification of
the political press, flew to Boston. There he was photographed, with his
parents and his brother Jeb, watching the Ryder Cup golf championship at The
Country Club in Brookline--the sort of venue where he usually took pains not to
be seen publicly. There was, inevitably, another fund-raiser to attend in
nearby Wayland but his real reason for being there was something else: the
captain of the American Ryder Cup team, Ben Crenshaw, of Austin, Texas, was
another athlete hero-friend of Bush's, and he had asked Bush to come to
Brookline to give the U.S. Ryder Cup team a pep talk if necessary. And, sure
enough, the European team opened up what seemed to be an insurmountable lead.
On the eve of the last day of the match, Bush came into the room where the team
was gathered and, by prearrangement with Crenshaw, recited the text of William
Barret Travis's letter from the Alamo.
Travis was the commander of the small, valiant Texas force that held off,
but was ultimately wiped out by, the Mexican Army at the Battle of the Alamo,
in 1836, when Texas was fighting to become an independent republic. What the
Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address is nationally, Travis's
letter, an unanswered call for reinforcements, is to Texans. Bush probably
encountered it in a Texas-history class at Sam Houston Elementary School in Midland.
"I am besieged by a thousand or more of the Mexicans under Santa
Anna," Travis wrote (and Bush repeated to the Ryder Cup team). "I
have sustained a continual Bombardment and cannonade for twenty-four hours and
have not lost a man. The enemy has demanded surrender at discretion, otherwise,
the garrison are to be put to the sword, if the fort is taken. I have answered
the demand with a cannon shot, and our flag still waves proudly from the walls.
I shall never surrender or retreat." Travis ends with this unforgettable,
triple-underlined kicker: "victory or death."
Six weeks after the Alamo fell, Texas won its independence at the Battle of
San Jacinto, where the Texas soldiers, shouting, "Remember the
Alamo!," killed several hundred Mexicans, while losing only nine of their
own. As governor of Texas, Bush installed a portrait of Sam Houston, commander
of the Texas forces at San Jacinto and then President of the Republic of Texas,
clad in the costume of the Roman consul Gaius Marius, in his office in the
state capitol. At Cooperstown, when Bush was asked about Nolan Ryan's
pummelling of Robin Ventura, the first words out of his mouth were
"Remember the Alamo!" In Boston, the day after hearing from Bush, the
American team staged a remarkable comeback and won the Ryder Cup.
Another early Bush event--this one not only indicative but
consequential--was a dinner in Chicago, on July 18, 2000, not long before the
Republican National Convention, attended by Bush; John C. Danforth, who had
retired as a senator from Missouri; his wife, Sally; and Dick Cheney, who left
after performing introductions. Danforth had emerged from the Vice-Presidential
search process, run by Cheney, as a leading choice, and this was an unannounced
courtship dinner. The appeal of the choice is instantly clear. Danforth is
distinguished, patrician, and thoughtful; he is an ordained Episcopalian
minister; as a central figure in the Washington establishment, he had
officiated at Katharine Graham's funeral; and he was a politician who could probably
bring into the Republican column an important swing state, and who had a
history of winning over Democratic voters. He had been one of the runners-up to
Dan Quayle when George H. W. Bush was picking his Vice-Presidential nominee in
1988. Although he had only one conservative credential, it was of particular
importance to the Bush family: in the Senate, he had successfully managed the
controversial Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas by the first
President Bush.
But something didn't click at the dinner. A few days later, Bush announced
that Cheney would be his Vice-Presidential nominee, and that decision had many
ramifications. To begin with, if Danforth had been Vice-President, Donald
Rumsfeld, Cheney's closest government associate, probably would not have become
Defense Secretary, and John Ashcroft, another Missourian, probably would not
have become Attorney General, so the Cabinet would not have had its most
powerful, and most conservative, members. It was also a decision that seemed to
reveal a number of Bush characteristics: his mistrust of Washington (Cheney, at
that point, was living in Dallas), his dislike of being upstaged (Danforth is
taller and more imposing than Bush), his political confidence, even
overconfidence (Cheney added nothing to the ticket electorally, in an election
where Bush turned out not to have enough votes), his attraction to the person
who presents himself as being merely a loyal servitor.
Last summer, I interviewed one of Bush's oldest friends, Clay Johnson, in
connection with a "Frontline" documentary on the Presidential
election, and heard a new version of Cheney's selection, one that reveals even
more about Bush. Johnson--a Texan who met Bush at Andover and was his roommate
at Yale, and who is currently a
deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, having worked for Bush
during his entire career as an elective officeholder--said that Bush had begun
the Vice-Presidential selection process by offering the nomination to Cheney.
"The now Vice-President declined the option, but did agree to head up the
search committee," Johnson said. "And then came back some months later
and said that in fact he'd changed his mind and he would be willing to run--to
be the President's running mate." Johnson said he had a hunch about what
had changed: "Lynne Cheney told some mutual friends of ours that she and
Dick decided that in fact they did want to join the Bush ticket, because they
came to really like George and Laura, and the Vice-President came to realize
that the President wanted to come up here to really make a difference. He was
not going to try to play it safe. Not try to extend an easy, moderately
successful four years into an easy, moderately successful eight years. He was
going to try to come up here and make dramatic changes to the issues he thought
needed to be addressed. And the Vice-President got very, very energized and excited
about doing that. And so now we have Dick Cheney as Vice-President."
In other words, the team that most people thought of as being made up of a
moderate, conciliatory, relatively unambitious Presidential candidate and his
bland, self-effacing, government technician of a running mate had thrown in
together on the basis of a mutual decision to govern in pursuit of radical
change. And they have done that.
Bush was a wildly popular governor of Texas, and a large part of his
national appeal was that he had governed in partnership with Democratic
legislators--that, to repeat two of his mantras from four years ago, he was
"a uniter, not a divider" and was going to end the "partisan
bickering" in Washington. In retrospect, everyone should have been paying
more attention to the strikingly changed correlation of political forces in
Texas--when Bush left office, there were no Democratic statewide officeholders,
and both houses of the state legislature were on their way to having
permanent-seeming Republican majorities. Still, the state seemed collectively
thrilled at the prospect of Bush's election to the Presidency. Bush himself,
overconfident as usual, plainly believed that he was going to win. Congress
Avenue, the main downtown boulevard in Austin, was set up on Election Night for
an enormous party.
In the ensuing electoral chaos, Bush appeared truly upset at first (his
usually flawless physical appearance was marred, for the only time I can
remember, by a boil that sprouted on his face), and then went through a phase
of manic joking with visitors to the Governor's Mansion and musing about
assembling a genuine coalition government, with several Democrats in the
Cabinet. Finally, he retreated to his ranch in Crawford while a cadre of family
loyalists did what needed to be done in his name.
The pattern--the initial bobble, the retreat, and the super-aggressive
comeback carried out by tough-guy surrogates--seems to be a well-established
one for Bush. His predecessor as governor, Ann Richards, whom Bush beat in
1994, told "Frontline" 's Martin Smith, "I never saw a tougher
campaign than the one when George Bush was the candidate. I wouldn't suggest to
you that George Bush does it all himself, because he doesn't. A lot of it is
done behind the scenes. So I would say George Bush's organization is the
toughest I've ever seen." His response to the attacks of September 11,
2001, exemplifies the pattern perfectly: Bush did not perform outstandingly on
September 11th itself, with his delayed reaction to the news, his flying around
the country for most of the day, his three shaky television appearances, and
his effective ceding of immediate decision-making authority to Cheney. But
within ten days he had emphatically declared that the United States was engaged
in a global war on terror.
In the earliest days of the Administration, it wasn't clear that Bush would
reject a moderate Presidency. In December, 2000, he held a meeting in Austin,
with Democrats present, to discuss education reform; he was both charming and
knowledgeable, and his visitors came away impressed. Then, not long after his
inauguration, Bush held a White House screening of the movie "Thirteen
Days," about the Cuban missile crisis, partly as a way of fostering a warm
relationship with Senator Edward Kennedy, of Massachusetts, whose brothers were
lionized in the movie, and who is the most important Democratic senator when it
comes to education issues. Several Kennedys, including the Senator, attended
the screening, and it looked as if a happy across-the-aisle partnership had
begun. Both Kennedy and George Miller, of California, who was the crucial
Democratic member of the House of Representatives on the subject of education,
and who had also been at the Austin meeting in December, decided to support
Bush's big education initiative, No Child Left Behind, which in the spring
passed both houses of Congress with overwhelming majorities. (Miller is as
unapologetically liberal as Kennedy, and also as gregarious, and therefore was
susceptible to the Bush laying on of hands.) It's a sign of how important a
victory on the final bill was for the Administration that on the morning of
September 11th Bush was in Florida at an event meant to promote the education
bill, and to help nudge the state more firmly into his column in 2004. At the
same time, Laura Bush was with Ted Kennedy at the Capitol, where she was to
testify before the Senate education committee, also to promote the bill.
In Texas today, the prevailing mood in the political community, and
especially among the old Democratic allies of Governor Bush, is one of
head-shaking wonderment over where the Bush they knew went. Brutal
state-legislative redistricting after the 2000 census left several of Governor
Bush's Democratic allies in existential peril. And the state legislature has
spent much of its energy since Bush left for Washington trying to fix what now
seem intractable problems in the state education system that somehow didn't
seem so when Bush was running for President. In Washington, Kennedy and Miller
are feeling profoundly wronged, and, since the passage of No Child Left Behind,
Bush has not tried to build comparable bipartisan support for any domestic
initiative. He went from being a landslide-generating politician in Texas to
being a toss-up-generating politician nationally, and from being a seeker of
the middle ground with Democrats in Texas to being a rightward pusher of the
political boundaries in Washington.
By supporting Bush, Kennedy and Miller were doing him a big favor, and
taking a risk, because they were going against the natural inclinations of one
of the most important interest groups in the Democratic Party, the teachers'
unions; for Kennedy and Miller, supporting No Child Left Behind was what
supporting a new tax would be for Bush. They went along because they believed
that the bill, by setting tougher national standards for public schools, would
help children; and, more to the point, they came away from their talks with
Bush believing that he was going to pour new federal funding into the schools.
They could tell the unions that they had got a lot more money for education in
exchange for the standards and the extensive new testing regime that went with
them.
Once the bill passed, there were no more chummy phone calls from Bush or
invitations to the White House for Kennedy and Miller, and then, when the next
federal budget came out, in January, the amount allotted to No Child Left
Behind was ninety million dollars less than Kennedy and Miller felt they had
been promised. Subsequent budgets brought the same pattern: no contact with the
White House, and funding far below what Bush had indicated he would commit. The
Secretary of Education, Rod Paige, has referred to the biggest teachers' union
as a "terrorist organization." Today, the public-school world is up in
arms and Kennedy and Miller have to take heavy, constant fire from their old
allies.
I spoke with Miller in Boston during the Democratic National Convention, and
he was much angrier than elected politicians usually allow themselves to be on
the record. "You fly with your eyes wide open here," he said. "I
knew exactly what I was doing. When a person breaks their word--that's it.
You're not gonna buy a horse from that guy again. He said it was a
thoroughbred." He went on, "They don't consult with the nations of
the world, and they don't consult with Congress, especially the Democrats in
Congress. They can do it all themselves. They don't want to take anybody's
advice on anything. It's the same isolation that got them into trouble in Iraq.
They find the basic tenets of democracy--very inconvenient."
Part of the problem for Miller and Kennedy is the difficulty of
communicating their version of what happened, because it entails a broken
promise--a promise that was spoken and therefore unenforceable--to increase
federal education spending by an even greater amount than it was increasing
already. So the Administration can express innocent mystification, in a way
that's hard to refute, over what the Democrats are so upset about. When I
interviewed Karen Hughes, Bush's communications adviser--a woman compared with
whom everyone else, even members of the Bush family, is disloyal and
off-message--she told the education story as another example of the betrayal of
the President by perfidious Washington Democrats.
"The only thing I can say is that you can reach out, but somebody else
has to take your hand," Hughes said, with an air of being terribly
disappointed, though not quite disappointed enough for her over-all amiability
to be reduced. "And I came to Washington and watched him reach out. And,
unfortunately, I don't think the hand was always returned. For example, he
reached out to Senator Ted Kennedy, and worked with Senator Kennedy closely on
education reforms. And they were able to pass the law. Now Senator Kennedy criticizes
those reforms, saying there's not enough funding. Well, the dollars have
increased by forty-nine per cent under the term of President George Bush.
That's a big increase even for a liberal from Massachusetts!" She laughed
merrily.
The one Democrat in Bush's Cabinet, Norman Mineta, the Secretary of
Transportation, is rarely visible to the public. Of the more moderate
Republican members of the Cabinet, Christine Todd Whitman, at the Environmental
Protection Agency, and Paul O'Neill, at the Treasury, have left, and Colin
Powell, at the State Department, is ever more obviously an outsider.
Appointments to federal commissions that are statutorily required to go to
Democrats have gone unfilled. On September 20, 2001, when Bush made his
war-on-terror speech to a joint session of Congress, he gave a big bear hug to
Tom Daschle, of South Dakota, the leader of the Senate Democrats, on his way
out of the House chamber--a gesture that, made by a master politician, with the
whole world watching, was surely not accidental. Daschle supported the
emergency spending measures that Bush proposed after the September 11th
attacks, and, earlier, he did Bush a favor by joining other senators in not
taking up the Congressional Black Caucus's resolution demanding a recount of
the 2000 Presidential-election results in Florida. Since then, Bush
Administration officials have visited South Dakota a number of times to
campaign for Daschle's defeat. His program for ending the partisan bickering in
Washington appears to consist of trying to insure that there are as few people
as possible in elected office who might be inclined to bicker with him, and
ignoring those who remain.
Bush was born on July 6, 1946, in New Haven, Connecticut, into about as
sociologically comfortable a berth as one can imagine. The United States was
the most powerful nation in the world, and his own extended family was in a
wonderfully favorable position within it. His father was a war-hero student at Yale, which his father,
great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, and several uncles and cousins had
attended before him; when George H. W. Bush was tapped for Skull and Bones, a
few months after George W. Bush was born, he was the fifth member of his family
to receive that honor. The family seat was in Greenwich, Connecticut, one of
the wealthiest towns in the country; George W.'s mother, Barbara, had grown up
just a short distance away, in Rye, New York, a town almost as prosperous, and
in a family almost as prominent. George W. Bush's grandfather Prescott Bush was
a managing partner of Brown Brothers Harriman, the Wall
Street investment house, whose headquarters were situated in a marble building
in downtown Manhattan, and was also a director of at least six corporations,
including CBS and Prudential Insurance.
Prescott Bush had got his job through George Herbert Walker, his father-in-law
and the namesake of both Presidents Bush. Walker retired from the firm to his
estates to enjoy a life of investing and sportsmanship.
The Bush family had been helped in the railroad business in Columbus, Ohio, by
a member of the Rockefeller family, and the connection persisted over the
generations. There was also a deep connection to another of America's principal
plutocratic families, the Harrimans. When George W. Bush was six, his
grandfather, who was a leader in the campaign to persuade Dwight Eisenhower to
run for President, was elected to the United States Senate from Connecticut.
There was almost no place that mattered in business or politics, in the United
States or Europe, that was out of the Bush family's range.
An important part of what politicians--first-rank politicians, anyway--do is
make fully realized dramatic characters out of themselves, who exist in an
intimate relationship with the voting public. The character has to bear some
relation to the real person, of course, but it is still a genuine act of
creation. Bush has done this impressively, making himself, despite his
background, the antithesis, and enemy, of "elitists": his conversion
from high-church Episcopalian to fundamentalist could serve as the shorthand
for this long-running process. James Robison, the Dallas television evangelist,
told Martin Smith that in Bush's view it was God's will that he leave the
humble life of a small-town Texan to run for President. As Robison recalled,
Bush said, "I want to be remembered the rest of my life, when I walk into Wal-Mart to buy bass lures, as
'This used to be our governor. His dad was President.' That's it." Then,
by way of explaining the upgrading of his ambitions, Bush said to Robison,
"I believe I'm supposed to" seek the White House. Implausible as it
may seem, Bush appears sincerely to think that the character he was describing
to Robison is who he really is.
"The disdain that George W. Bush and his brother Jeb have for America's
elite institutions is genuine and deeply felt," Peter Schweizer and
Rochelle Schweizer write in their fascinating family-insider book, "The
Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty." Even the imperturbable Laura Bush, when I
interviewed her, displayed a flash of annoyance at a question that she
obviously read as a cultural put-down from a secular East Coast snob. I asked
her whether people who are serious about their religious faith could disagree
about the morality of abortion. With a tight smile, she replied, "I don't
agree with your premise that people of faith have to be serious. Or that people
of faith aren't tolerant. You're just wrong. There are people all over the
world who have very, very strong faith that are tolerant. And, in fact, people
with a really strong faith, I think, are more tolerant."
This kind of bristling plainly isn't being faked, but Bush's anti-elitism
can also be seen as a manifestation of his very strong power drive. As the
Schweizers observe, the world Bush was born into was the epicenter of the
Republican Party then, and it isn't now. Al Gore carried Connecticut in 2000,
and John Kerry will likely carry it in 2004; Westchester County, New York,
where Barbara Bush grew up, is now the political seat of the Clintons, and it
votes Democratic, too. In becoming a martially conservative, tax-cutting,
fundamentalist-Christian businessman from the Southwest, Bush has moved in the
same direction as his party has during his lifetime (and he will move it
further while he is at its helm). If he had been elite in the manner of his
grandfather, rather than elite in the way he is now, he would not have had much
of a political career.
Bush seems to have begun disliking elitists when he was a student at Yale.
Yale presented to him a tableau that was different from the one his father
encountered: the students and faculty were starting to become markedly more
intellectual and more liberal. It's also the case that George H. W. Bush was
the exemplar of everything the institution cherished at the time he was there,
and that George W. Bush was not. But Bush has not, to say the least, abandoned
the idea of himself as a member, not to say the undisputed leader, of the
authority-holding group in America. Occasionally, a sign escapes from Bush's
world to indicate that it isn't quite as down-home as it appears. Clay Johnson
offered this comment, out of an A. R. Gurney play, about John Kerry as a young
man: "For what it's worth, I know he wasn't popular. People just didn't
like him. Very self-serving, very vain. Wouldn't pass the puck. Catch my drift?
He was booed at his fortieth St. Paul's reunion." The master life strategy
for Bush has been to leave the game he can't win and create a new one that he
dominates.
Accounts that seep out of this very un-leaky White House present it as an
almost anti-egalitarian environment. Bush likes being President. "This is
fun!" he tells people sometimes, with boyish enthusiasm, but he makes an
effort to create a feeling of authority around himself. He never appears in the
Oval Office dressed informally (and almost never appears on the campaign trail
dressed formally). People call Bush "the President," even behind his back.
They stand when he enters a room. Bush genially complains, in a way that
indicates less than complete displeasure, about the deference people show him
in the Oval Office, even people who have come intending to criticize or
disagree with him. He is often short-tempered and demanding with his staff, and
he both insists on and receives total loyalty. One never expects to see blind
quotes in the newspapers from inside the Bush campaign criticizing key staff
members or even the candidate himself, such as one regularly sees from inside
the Kerry campaign; all the people in the Bush campaign's high command work
only for Bush, and not for any fancy fees, either.
In his first spring as President, Bush returned to Yale to deliver the
commencement address. The trip was billed as a demonstration of the fact that
he didn't have a problem with Yale after all, but, typically, he
extracted a special fealty from the institution as a condition of his coming.
He received an honorary degree (something that Yale didn't award his father until
near the end of his term, despite a vigorous lobbying campaign by George W.
Bush). In addition, he was honored, as the President, by being allowed to break
Yale's long-standing tradition of
not having a commencement speaker. And then he gave a speech, to an audience
many of whose members were leaving Yale with heavy tuition debts, in which he
fondly recalled how unseriously he'd taken his education there. Like a lot of
talented politicians, Bush in a crowd can demonstrate a real love, a need, for
people, but in other settings he needs, rather, to display a kind of animal
superiority. He teases, he touches, he goads, he sends a wink or a cold stare,
he bestows nicknames, and, in this campaign, of course, he relentlessly
attacks. In general, he insists, with amazing success, on conducting
discussions on terms that he alone has set, and on the assumption that reality
is what he alone has declared it to be (for example, his recent assertion at
the U.N. that "today the Iraqi and Afghan people are on the path to
democracy and freedom"). And, in deciding to run first for governor and
then for President, he was not troubled by his lack of what would customarily
be considered a full measure of experience and preparation. Bush usually tries
to establish himself in a position in which he has as much control as possible,
and he usually tries to get there not by the normal patient route but by
behaving so aggressively that a more direct path opens up.
When someone gravitates so strongly away from the usual back-and-forth of
human relations, it can be taken as a sign of confidence--or of insecurity.
Despite the fortunate circumstances of his birth, Bush, like everybody else,
has sustained his share of wounds. When he was seven years old, his younger
sister, Robin, died, and her illness kept his parents away from home a lot.
George and Barbara Bush were unusually busy parents anyway; in Ron Suskind's
book about Paul O'Neill's brief, unhappy tour in the Bush Administration, there
is a story about O'Neill's wife, Nancy, who, seated next to the President at a
dinner, tries to make conversation by asking him what was the meal he most
liked his mother to prepare when he was growing up. Bush replied, "You got
to be kiddin'. My mother never cooked. The woman had frostbite on her fingers.
Everything right out of the freezer."
The Schweizers present the senior Bushes as openly having higher
expectations for their second son, Jeb, than for their eldest. (They quote
George H. W. Bush saying of his son George, "He is good, this boy of
ours," and of Jeb, "There is no question in my mind that he will become
a major political figure in the country.") They report that, on Election
Night in 1994, when Bush won the governor's race in Texas and his brother lost
the governor's race in Florida, an aunt overheard him saying on the phone to
his father, in the middle of what was supposed to be the big congratulatory
phone call, "Why do you feel bad about Jeb? Why don't you feel good about
me?" Bush was never a star student--the Schweizers quote another close
relative as saying she thinks that he has attention-deficit disorder--and his
life up to middle age was not especially affirming. It is a mark of his
political skill that, in the 2000 campaign, he successfully turned a thin
resume into a redemption story of an ex-drinker who found God, but, still, he
has rarely had a happy experience in situations where he was not completely in
control, and had to deal with others as peers and follow preexisting rules.
A well-worn White House talking point about the Bush-Cheney relationship is
that it is especially solid because the Vice-President has had several heart
attacks and that keeps him from having Presidential ambitions of his own. But
why is this an important point for Bush? Was his father made intensely
uncomfortable by the possibility that Dan Quayle might run for President one
day, or Bill Clinton by Al Gore's ambitions? The Bush family has a reputation
for being unusually preoccupied with loyalty and unusually insistent that staff
people know their place. And George W. Bush seems more that way than the other
Bushes. A very funny scene early in Richard Ben Cramer's book about the 1988
Presidential campaign, "What It Takes," shows Bush blowing his stack
when he sees his father's White House chief of staff, Craig Fuller, sitting in
what he regards as a family seat at a baseball game, and, without a second's
thought, loudly complaining about Fuller's presumptuousness. That kind of
assurance shows a deep sense of comfort with being in the superior position,
but not necessarily a deep sense of self-confidence.
I asked Laura Bush to give a thumbnail description of her husband, as if she
were a novelist introducing a character. Here's what she said: "Well, my
husband has a great sense of humor. He's very funny. He's gregarious. He likes
people. He loves to be with people. He remembers people. He's very aware of the
story of people. When he meets people, he asks them about themselves. . . .
He's very quick. He's quick-witted. He's very quick with the one-liners. He's
funny that way. . . . I think maybe he got that characteristic, learned to be
sort of the wise guy, to make his parents laugh, when his little sister died
when he was seven." She went on, "And he's very competitive. He's
competitive as an athlete. And he's competitive as a person, of course,
needless to say. You know, you have to be very competitive to run for political
office." In conclusion, she said, "He's very strong. And he's tough.
And these are times that require people who are very strong."
On the night of September 11th, when Bush walked into the Presidential
Emergency Operations Center, underneath the White House, he said, according to
Richard Clarke, who was then the National Security Council's counterterrorism
expert, "We are going to kick some ass." By September 12th, as
several accounts have made clear, talk had begun inside the Administration
about the possibility of war with Iraq. Clarke describes Bush's buttonholing
him on the twelfth and saying, "See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked
in any way." On the afternoon of September 11th, Rumsfeld had sent a note
to General Richard Myers about the possibility of striking back at Iraq. That
weekend, when the War Cabinet gathered at Camp David, Paul Wolfowitz, the
Deputy Secretary of Defense, pushed for a military move against Iraq.
The idea of removing Saddam Hussein from power had been circulating in the
Bush Administration even before September 11th. Bill Clinton and Al Gore were
notionally committed to "regime change" in Iraq; Bush was looking for
a way to make the Iraq policy more aggressive. O'Neill describes a meeting of
the National Security Council on January 30, 2001, that was devoted,
inconclusively, to this subject. Deciding to invade, conquer, and occupy Iraq
is by far the most consequential thing that Bush has done as President, and
it's frustrating that we don't know, and probably won't for years, exactly
when, how, and why he made the decision.
Bob Woodward's two most recent books, "Bush at War" and "Plan
of Attack," give the most detailed account of the path to war. Woodward's
theory is that when Bush privately instructed Rumsfeld to update existing war
plans for Iraq, on November 21, 2001, it set things inexorably in motion. Bush
could have stopped the momentum toward war, of course, but he chose not to.
When I asked Laura Bush about the timing, she said, "I don't know if I can
tell you exactly when he made that decision. But I would say the decision was
slow in coming, and with very deliberate--with every angle looked at. And
that's the decision you would expect any President to make when he puts
American troops in harm's way."
O'Neill has said it was his impression that Bush had made up his mind about
Iraq by the time he took office. Cheney told a friend that he expected that
Bush had decided by the time he gave his "axis of evil" speech, in January,
2002. Richard Haass, who was, until June, 2003, the head of the policy-planning
staff in the State Department and a key adviser to Colin Powell, says that, by
the summer of 2002, the Administration had "lit the fuse" on the Iraq
issue. Haass is now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and not long
ago I went to see him there to talk about the war. I asked him why,
fundamentally, Bush had decided to go to war.
"I will go to my grave not knowing that," Haass said. "I
can't answer it. I can't explain the strategic obsession with Iraq--why it rose
to the top of people's priority list. I just can't explain why so many people
thought this was so important to do. But, if there was a hidden reason, the one
I heard most was that we needed to change the geopolitical momentum after 9/11.
People wanted to show that we can dish it out as well as take it. We're not a
pitiful helpless giant. We can play offense as well as defense. I heard that
from some people. Of course, some would say that Afghanistan was enough. There
are two what-ifs. One, what if there had been no 9/11--would it have happened?
I think the odds are slightly against it, even though some people were for it.
Two, what if we knew there were no weapons of mass destruction? I'd say no. But
the urge to do this existed pre-9/11. What 9/11 did was change the atmosphere
in which decisions were made. The only serious argument for war was weapons of
mass destruction."
The lack of clarity about Bush's decision is important, and it has a lot to
do with why things have gone so badly in Iraq after the quick, impressive
military victory. The President who screened "Thirteen Days" at the
White House obviously did not conduct the kind of exercise depicted in that
film, in which a President, at the brink of war, elaborately seeks all possible
information, tries to expose himself to every argument, and debates with his
top officials the consequences of every possible course of action. In the
hundreds of pages of Woodward's books, nothing like this ever happens.
Richard Clarke told Martin Smith, "He doesn't reach out, typically, for
a lot of experts. He has a very narrow, regulated, highly regimented set of
channels to get advice. One of the first things we were told was 'Don't write a
lot of briefing papers. And don't make the briefing papers very long.' Because
this President is not a reader. He likes oral briefings, and he likes them from
the national-security adviser, the White House chief of staff, and the
Vice-President. He's not into big meetings. And he's not into big briefing
books." Clarke added, "The contrast with Clinton was that Clinton
would hold a meeting with you. And he read your briefing materials. But also,
having read your briefing materials, he would have gone out and found other
materials somehow. He would have directly called people up. Not people in the
government, necessarily. Experts, outside the government. Or he would have
found magazine articles, or--or books on the subject. So that, when you were
briefing him, frequently you had the feeling that he knew more about the
subject than you did. And he wasn't showing off. He had just done his
homework." By contrast, Bob Woodward told me that, during an interview he
conducted with Bush in December, 2001, he asked the President whether he ever
sought advice about the war on terror from distinguished figures outside his
Administration, such as Brent Scowcroft, his father's national-security
adviser. Woodward told me that Bush said to him, "I have no outside
advice. Anybody who says they're an outside adviser of this Administration on
this particular matter is not telling the truth. First of all, in the initial
phase of this war, I never left the compound. Nor did anybody come in the
compound. I was, you talk about one guy in a bubble." Bush said, "The
only true advice I receive is from our war council," and he added, "I
didn't call around, asking, 'What the heck do you think we ought to do?' "
In August, 2002, Scowcroft wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal
opposing the idea of war in Iraq. Such a move seemed uncharacteristic for an
inside player like him, but he obviously felt that doubts about Iraq, even
coming from someone with his bona fides, couldn't get a private hearing in the
Bush White House.
Haass reminded me that he had gone to see Condoleezza Rice, the
national-security adviser, in June to express doubts about going to war, and
came away with the impression that the decision had already been made.
Afterward, he reported to his boss, Colin Powell, what Rice had said. By August,
Powell had come around to the view that the war couldn't be headed off. He
decided that his best chance was to influence how it was done, not whether. He
argued passionately for going to Congress and the United Nations, and he
persuaded Bush. Shortly after Scowcroft's article appeared, Cheney made a fiery
pro-war speech at a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention. So it was Scowcroft
and Cheney, not Powell and Bush, who were conducting the fundamental debate.
The war in the War Cabinet was unusually intense even by Washington's high
standards. Bush's advisers like to describe him as an M.B.A. President, or a
C.E.O. President--someone who isn't afraid of surrounding himself with strong
figures, and who firmly sets a general direction while leaving the details to
others. The problem with this description is that people who run effective
organizations don't let their underlings squabble endlessly, so that
fundamental questions are unresolved for months. They also don't relegate
matters of the utmost urgency, such as the initial decision on who was to be in
charge of the reconstruction of Iraq, to the level of details to be worked out
by others. Before the war, virtually everyone who knew anything about Iraq was
warning, loudly, that achieving a conventional military victory would be,
relatively speaking, the easy part of the operation. The hard part would be
making Iraq function as a coherent democratic nation afterward, because of its
history of ethnic division, violence, and resistance to central governmental authority.
Bush doesn't seem to have spent much time worrying about that.
Even when Bush was governor of Texas, he liked allowing his top aides to
argue heatedly in his presence. Accounts of such scenes are sketchy, but what
they evoke is a discussion in which things don't get sorted through and
resolved. Bush is the dominant presence--a position that he establishes by
asking a few pointed questions, by giving very broad over-all signals, or by
simply allowing other people to fight openly for his favor--but he does not
either guide or take part in the exchange that would lead to a decision. In the
early days of his Presidential campaign, Bush was introduced by his new circle
of policy advisers to a Washington institution called a "murder
board," in which a politician's aides fire hostile questions at him as a
method of preparing for the rigors of public appearances. Bush resisted, and
had to be talked into it. He prefers to assemble a group of friendly people
from the conservative movement, who are profoundly grateful for being granted
time in his presence, and to free-associate about the issues of the day--tuning
up the instrument, as it were--while they listen. And, in trying to figure out
his position on an issue, Bush, like a lot of other politicians, doesn't so
much analyze as look for a hook--a phrase or a way of framing the issue that
feels instinctively right to him. In his case, instinct usually takes him to a
position where he is in charge and everyone else has to adjust.
The long period of preparation for the war in Iraq now appears to have been
devoted more to justifying a foregone conclusion than to actually
preparing--except in the case of the invasion itself. The Administration's
hawks relentlessly pushed for higher intelligence estimates of the threat that
Saddam Hussein represented and for lower military estimates of what the
invasion and the occupation would require. Haass, who was frozen out by the
hawks, said, "There were a lot of loaded assumptions about the analysis:
The aftermath would be a lesser included case of the war. The Iraqis would see
the coalition as liberators and they'd be welcomed. Those who didn't buy in
were excluded. People who raised implementation questions were seen as backdoor
critics of the war."
When Bush went to the United Nations in the fall of 2002 and obtained a
resolution that got weapons inspectors back into Iraq, it was more as a
concession to Powell than as a thought-through Administration policy. The
hawks, who had always been contemptuous of the U.N., were dismissive of the
inspection process. (A little-noticed nugget in Woodward's "Plan of
Attack" is that the Administration spied on Hans Blix, the chief U.N.
weapons inspector, while he was doing his work.) The Administration was unable
or unwilling to get the heads of state of the other Security Council members to
agree at the outset on what they would consider an unacceptable result from the
inspections. So on the eve of war, when Bush declared the result unacceptable,
the nations that were capable of sending large numbers of troops to Iraq didn't
agree with him and refused to help, which is one reason that the occupation of
Iraq has been so expensive and has stretched the U.S. military past its limits.
The Administration consistently pushed every aspect of Iraq policy--intelligence-gathering,
diplomacy, military strategy, foreign-policy doctrine, and, of course, the
treatment of prisoners--into a new realm of statecraft, characterized by a
total and, it has turned out, excessive faith that pure force would produce far
better results than anyone had previously realized. Bush's advisers urged him
in this direction, but he chose which advisers to hire and to listen to. It was
really a natural outgrowth of who he is.
In the current Presidential campaign, Bush has expertly drawn attention away
from how high a price the United States has paid for the war in Iraq. It is
difficult to find anybody in Washington, in either party, who will seriously
defend Bush's management of Iraq. Most of the available armed forces of the United
States are pinned down in a place that represents a threat chiefly because
American troops are there. That limits American options in places that pose
much more genuine threats. The reputation of American intelligence agencies has
been badly damaged--would anyone now heed warnings from them? It is
increasingly difficult to imagine other major powers joining the United States
in an international endeavor, even one that isn't a war. The government's
financial resources are depleted. The U.S. military in Iraq has started trying
to take back areas of the country now controlled by insurgents, and it may not
be safe enough there for the scheduled elections to be held in January. The
country still has no meaningful army or police force. It doesn't seem that there
will be, any time soon, a way to extract the American forces without risking
Iraq's descent into chaos, of a kind that would be both dangerous and
humiliating to the United States and would betray Bush's repeated promises to
bring the Iraqis a better life.
The Bush campaign has taken the discussion of the war, whose specifics are
so unfavorable to him, to the much more propitious level of generalization:
Democrats and the international community are incapable of responding to evil
and to danger: Don't you feel safer with Bush in the White House? When I talked
with Karen Hughes, I asked whether President Bush still feels that Saddam
Hussein's regime represented enough of a threat to justify war. She gave an
answer that was a version of something Bush often says: "I think he feels
that Saddam Hussein was a threat to America, and that the risks in a
post-September 11th world--knowing what we know after September 11th, that
there are terrorists who hate us, that we had a tyrannical dictator who hated
us, who we know had at least the capability of developing weapons of mass
destruction, because he had done so in the past and had used them in the past,
and knowing that we have terrorists who want to gain access to those
weapons--yes, we did the right thing. We have to view those kinds of threats as
the very, very serious threats that they are. Because the nightmare scenario
that we're going to face, unfortunately, I think, for decades to come, is that
these terrorists, who want to sow chaos and want--they want to murder. That's
what they want to do. They want to shock us and terrorize us and cause us to
retreat. And the nightmare scenario that we have to prevent is that they would
somehow access the means to do so on an even wider scale." This version of
the war has Bush playing Nolan Ryan to Saddam's Robin Ventura--except in this
case Ryan, sensing a gathering danger, rushes the plate to deliver his famous
thrashing.
President Bush, Hughes remarked, "believes that you use campaigns to
build support for the things you want to do when you're in office." This
is true, and the constant barrage of charges (most of them flung by the Bush
camp) in this campaign has obscured what Bush has set forth, on a separate
track, as his goals for his second term. He is not secretive; quite often, he
has laid out ambitious plans months or years before they were launched, in the
texts of public speeches of the sort that Washington usually doesn't pay much
attention to--so-called "major policy addresses." Bush likes to put
down markers that permit him a great deal of latitude. During his first six
months in office--before September 11th, that is--he changed things to a degree
that one would associate with somebody who had won in a landslide, not in a
tie. In Bill Clinton's last year in office, the federal government had a
surplus of $236.4 billion, and the surplus was rhetorically dedicated, for all
time, to a metaphoric "lockbox" devoted to the two biggest domestic
federal programs, Social Security and Medicare. Bush cut taxes to such an extent,
even before the war on terror began, that the surplus was likely to evaporate
(the government is now running a four-hundred-and-twenty-two-billion-dollar
deficit), and the lockbox, supposedly a defining feature of American politics,
is a distant memory.
Before September 11th, Bush unilaterally withdrew the United States from the
Kyoto accords on global warming, and he had signalled a desire to withdraw from
the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the International Criminal Court. He
launched a program to develop missile defense, with a view to changing American
nuclear strategy fundamentally. He avoided direct dealings with Yasir Arafat,
of the Palestinian Authority, which was a departure from the practice of the
Clinton Administration, and he committed the United States to defend Taiwan
against attack, which represented a tilt against China that the previous six
Presidents had chosen not to make. And he was trying to find a way to remove
Saddam Hussein from power.
In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Bush said,
"We are staying on the offensive, striking terrorists abroad so we do not
have to face them here at home. And we are working to advance liberty in the
broader Middle East, because freedom will bring a future of hope and the peace
we all want. And we will prevail." This statement leaves Bush a lot of
room for further maneuvering in the Arab world in a second term. Another act
that received insufficient attention was his cutting off of relations, in 2003,
with Muhammad Khatami, the elected head of state in Iran--whom the Clinton
Administration had treated as a friend--which followed a year of openly wishing
for the overthrow of Khatami's government. As Iran moves toward having nuclear
weapons--the evidence is much clearer than it was in the case of Saddam
Hussein--and increasingly exerts its influence in Iraq in a way that is harmful
to American interests, it's hard to imagine that Bush won't feel he has to act.
Pakistan is unstable (President Pervez Musharraf has survived multiple
assassination attempts), and it has nuclear weapons. No President could allow
Musharraf to fall and let Pakistan's weapons get into the wrong hands in the
aftermath, and Bush would surely respond more forcefully, and less cautiously,
than another President confronted with that situation.
Quite often this year, Bush has wondered publicly about the desirability of
fundamental changes in the tax system and in Social Security. He doesn't speak
about the deficit as a problem to be solved, and that is probably because he
doesn't regard it as such. Instead, the prevailing view in the White House
seems to be that big government deficits might actually be a force for good,
because they make it impossible for government to grow. (In this respect, Bush
is much more like Ronald Reagan than like his father, who raised taxes to close
the deficits that Reagan policies had helped create and, partly as a result,
lost his reelection campaign.) Bush is already trying to make permanent some
early tax cuts that were passed with expiration dates, and that would increase
the deficit more. He has also speculated during campaign appearances about
abolishing the progressive income tax in favor of a flat tax, or replacing the
income tax altogether, with a national sales tax or a value-added tax, like the
one he proposed unsuccessfully in Texas in 1997. During his first term, he
appointed a little-noticed commission on the future of Social Security, which
has called for phasing out the existing system of universal government-administered
retirement benefits and phasing in personal retirement accounts. (Bush has
called for some variant of this idea in every State of the Union address.) Even
Republicans in Congress balked, and nothing happened; but now the
Administration is planning a campaign to change Social Security along the lines
that the commission recommended. The prescription-drug-benefit bill that
Congress passed last year has a provision--which, again, didn't get much
notice--to do the same thing in health care, by establishing individual
"health savings accounts" as an alternative to the government's
guaranteeing medical coverage.
Bush, unlike his father, is drawn to big, landscape-changing ideas,
and--also unlike his father--he thinks like a politician. Much of what he has
planned for the second term is meant to serve the goal of making the Republican
Party as dominant in national politics as Bush's foreign policy means to make
the United States in world affairs. The Democrats are the party of government;
systematically reducing government's ability to provide services, its
employment base, and its role as a provider of the two most essential
guarantees, pensions and medical care, cuts off the Democrats' oxygen supply.
In his first term, Bush has won confirmation for two hundred and one of his two
hundred and twenty-six appointees to the federal judiciary--all but two of them
Republicans--and in a second term he would likely get the opportunity to
appoint as many as three Supreme Court justices.
In early 2000, writing about Bush in these pages, I said that he seemed to
want to become President very badly, but that he did not seem to want to do a
lot once in office. Boy, was I wrong! If the voters give Bush a second term, he
would, it seems, govern with the goal of a Franklin Roosevelt-level
transformation--in the opposite direction, of course--of the relation of
citizen to state and of the United States to the rest of the world. He would
pursue ends that are now outside what most people conceive of as the compass
points of the debate, by means that are more aggressive than we are accustomed
to. And he couldn't possibly win by a smaller margin than last time, so he
couldn't possibly avoid the conclusion that he had been given a more expansive
mandate.