The Man Who Isn't There
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Another issue I found troubling was the nexus between religion and politics. I'm a big believer in the First Amendment. I think the Bill of Rights—and the First Amendment in particular—represents the United States' greatest contribution to civilization: free speech, a free press, and separation of church and state. I'm not nutty about this. I don't see anything wrong with the display of the Ten Commandments on the Capitol grounds, but if the courts ultimately order it removed, I don't want some headline-grabbing judge to defy the law he has sworn to uphold. I was even willing to accept Bush's plan for faith-based social services; churches have a much better chance of success in dealing with drug and alcohol rehabilitation than government agencies do. If it works, I'm not going to throw away people's lives just because someone might have to listen to a denominational prayer. On the other hand, I was appalled by Bush's decision to limit federal support for stem cell research. The conflict between religion and science is an old one, going back at least to Galileo, and the church has almost always been on the wrong side. I understand why the issue mattered to Bush. He had made a campaign promise to the religious right not to allow federal funding for the research, and as I said, he had learned from his father the cost of alienating his political base. But a lot of Republicans favored federal funding because of its potential for human progress. I fail to understand how anyone who knows a lot about the issue could be against giving science a chance to cure terrible diseases. When the issue got hot, Bush had to back off and find a compromise. Still, in the light of history, he made the wrong choice.
ALL OF THESE CONCERNS LOOMED LARGE at the time, but they faded into the background on the morning of September 11, 2001. In a democracy, even decisions of war and peace must be made within a political framework. The framework for Bush was that his presidency was adrift before the calamity of 9/11; after the early successes of the education bill and the tax cuts, the rest of his legislative program had stalled. His job- approval rating was a lukewarm 50 percent. The political importance of 9/11 for George W. Bush cannot be overstated. It united the nation in tragedy. It provided him with an opportunity for leadership and created the one thing a leader needs most: followers. And it defined his presidency, giving him the sense of purpose that he had previously lacked.
In a way, Bush was repeating as president the evolution he had gone through in his personal life, when he stopped drinking and became a grown-up at age forty. As governor, he was supremely self-confident, a trait that his critics on the national stage would later see as cockiness or arrogance but which to me seemed to be something more profound: the result of having lived most of his life being less than pleased with himself and then turning his life around through faith and force of will. Now he had to prove himself again, this time to the world. Here's what he had to say about the way other world leaders viewed him, in an interview for Bob Woodward's book Bush at War: "I'm the toxic Texan, right? In these people's minds, I'm the new guy. They don't know who I am." They should have seen the letter he wrote in longhand to his father on the night of October 7, 2001, to thank him for all he had done and to tell him that he had ordered the bombing of Afghanistan to begin. I saw it in 2002 at the George Bush presidential library at Texas A&M, as part of an exhibit about the two father-and-son presidents, John and John Quincy Adams and George and George W. Bush. The bullhorn Bush had used when he spoke at the still-smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center was there and so was the New York City firefighter's pullover he had worn when he threw a strike before the first game of the World Series, at Yankee Stadium, but I found the letter to be the most compelling item, especially its conclusion: "I feel no sense of the so-called heavy burden of the office."
There it is: a one-sentence character sketch. Other presidents have agonized over hard choices—think of Lyndon Johnson in the early days of Vietnam, wanting to get out yet knowing that he couldn't—but not Bush. "The best thing he does is make decisions," his longtime political guru, Karl Rove, told me during the gubernatorial years. Rove went on to say that it was more important for a leader to make a decision and stick by it than that the decision be absolutely right. Bush is comfortable with the burdens of the office because he doesn't feel them the way others do: He never looks back, never second-guesses himself, never shows weakness, never admits a mistake, never reverses course. And it drives his critics crazy.
If you're going to stay the course, come what may, you had better be right, especially if the stakes are high and the odds are long. Even as governor, Bush was prone to roll the dice; he liked the big play. Following the old political rule that it is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, he announced before his second legislative session in 1997, without consulting Bullock or Laney, that he wanted $1 billion of a $3 billion surplus (those were the days!) to be used for property tax relief. Bullock and Laney didn't like his unilateralism, but they went along. Even bolder, he led a drive that session to reform the state's tax structure by shifting property taxes to business taxes. "Now we'll find out: Can government act prior to a crisis?" he told me. Well, I knew the answer to that one: No. After the plan failed in the last days of the session, Bush told me, "One of these days the Legislature will wish they had passed it." (That day is now.) But Bush wasn't going to wait for the crisis to arrive. His reasoning for taking on tax reform was the same as his reasoning for invading Iraq: the preemptive strike. But tax reform is one thing, and regime change in Iraq is quite another.
"THE LOVE HIM, HATE HIM PRESIDENT" was the headline of Time's December 1 cover story about Bush. "He is the man about whom Americans feel little ambivalence," the story said. "People tend to love him or hate him without any complicating shades of gray." Hmmm. Am I all alone out here in a gray area? I certainly don't hate him. I found him to be a good man with decent instincts. Those who follow the national media don't hear this from journalists, but if you read books journalists have written about him—Woodward's Bush at War, Frank Bruni's Ambling Into History—his character and personality break through. I realize that there are millions of people in America, to say nothing of worldwide, who think that he deliberately lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda, but I can't imagine that the person I knew, who campaigned on restoring honor and dignity to the White House, would deliberately lie to the American people. (I can believe it of Dick Cheney, whom I know only through the media, just as others can believe it of Bush, whom they know only in the same way.)
But I don't love him either. For one thing, I gave up loving politicians long ago. Politics is noble in conception but too often ignoble in practice; it puts expedience on public display. For another, I disagree with him about too many things, including the big one of war and peace. You might reasonably ask: Who am I to disagree with the president of the United States? Well, it's a free country. But more than that, I majored in history, and my favorite professor drummed into us the obligation to be judgmental, about the present as well as the past. "Every man his own historian," he would say.
So here's what this individual historian believes. First, when dealing with the rest of the world, America must abide by its basic principles, which, as Lincoln said just before the outbreak of civil war, in 1861, offer "hope to the world for all future time." He added, "If [the country] can't be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful." Second, the most effective foreign policy for a great power is the one laid down almost one hundred years ago by Theodore Roosevelt: "Speak softly and carry a big stick."
On my personal scorecard, Bush is zero for two. What is especially sad about this is that he had the country overwhelmingly behind him after 9/11. The moment that everything changed came in the 2002 State of the Union address, when Bush identified an "axis of evil": Iraq, Iran, North Korea. So much for speaking softly. He could have said the same thing in many different ways; the way that he chose—boldness, always boldness—committed us to act, for a president does not employ words like "evil" casually. To use that label is to raise the stakes, because how can good (that's us) tolerate evil?
