DECISION POINTS I
By William Urban
The title of George W. Bush’s memoirs tell much about the contents. Instead of rambling on about second grade teachers and such, he read a number of autobiographies and chose a format that concentrated on key moments in his presidency. This allowed him to pick and choose the subjects to write about, thereby avoiding altogether matters such as whether Clinton staffers had torn all the W letters out of the computer keyboards, a petty insult that he told his staffers to ignore. There were many such exasperating moments, but they did not bother him until the last years of his presidency. That’s politics, he said, get used to it.
And yes, he can read. He had a contest with Karl Rove to see who read the most, counting pages and contents, not just titles. I’m sure, too, that he wrote this book himself, though probably with some help in digging out old speeches. U.S. Grant was his model. That was a good choice. Grant, too, went from very popular to being universally criticized, then to being admired again. In Grant’s case, the historians waited until the slaughter of the Great War to call him the Butcher; in contrast, Dan Rather readily believed falsified military service records to call Bush a draft dodger.
He had hoped to be the first president not to veto a bill, an ambition he does not mention here, but one he held to for five years. But after the Democrats took control of both houses of Congress, they delighted in sending him bills that he had veto; the bills made sense to the more energized wing of the party, but the rest of the Democrats went along just to annoy the president. This frustrated him greatly, since he passionately believed that the parties should work together for the good of the country — as they had done for educational reform and changes to Medicare — but later it was nothing but “Bush lied, people died.”
He spent one chapter on the Iraq war, which at the time of his writing (2010) he thought was entirely justified because it had resulted in a democratic Iraq, with Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds working together. When he left office Iraq was essentially at peace, there was hope for an agreement for stationing some American troops as trainers and a ready response force, and so forth. All that vanished in the next year, and it will be a long time before historians can get past their political biases to judge fairly the ups and downs of American policy there. Even now, Bush speaking of the “liberation” of Iraq makes sense only to those who remember what Saddam Hussein was like and why everyone considered him dangerous.
I listened to Bush’s memoir on an audio book from the Warren County Library. It was never dull. The reader caught Bush’s accent and cadence right down to mispronouncing names. He also caught Bush’s passion about religion, about legislation and his frustration with foreign leaders and Congress.
Bush truly believed that investing Social Security contributions in stocks and bonds would be good for most retirees, especially for Blacks, who would be able to pass along that money on to their children. As it was, with an average shorter life-span, Blacks were collecting less from traditional Social Security than they would have from an investment. But he couldn’t even get Republicans on board. There was too much suspicion of Wall Street.
His last chapter was on the Housing Boom and Collapse. He hadn’t seen it coming. Nor had anyone else. Nor did anyone have a suggestion for how to deal with it painlessly. TARP — buying up the bad loans and bailing out companies — was distasteful, but so was the prospect of paralyzing the banking industry. Everybody depended on banks. He couldn’t let them collapse.
Similarly, everyone who read the intelligence reports on Saddam Hussein concluded that he had to go. In 1998 Bill Clinton got congressional approval to remove him; in 2003 Hillary Clinton and John Kerry were persuaded (“I voted for the war before I voted against it.”) that only war would get rid of him; and all the western intelligence agencies agreed that Saddam Hussein had not gotten rid of his chemical weapons and that he was supporting terrorists all across the Middle East.
For a decade now liberal orthodoxy has all but declared Bush a war criminal. This was nowhere more obvious that in the Norwegian committee that awarded Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize for nothing more than not being George W Bush. No, that’s an exaggeration. He promised to do everything differently, and he has lived up to that.
Now this is clearly changing. In a recent article in the New York Review of Books Bush comes across as a principled, independent leader who was not the puppet of Dick Cheney. The NYRB! Not so long ago even its reviews of poetry would end with denunciations of George W Bush.
Other evidence is the disenchantment with President Obama having continued some unpopular Bush policies — Guantanamo, NSA surveillance, drones — and having expanded others. The stock market is soaring, benefiting the top 1% greatly (and those of us with retirement accounts), interest rates are low, benefiting those who want to borrow (but not those of us with bank accounts), and Bush remains out of the spotlight, not calling attention to himself in visiting veterans hospitals.
Al Gore has also vanished from political events, showing up only at Environmental Conferences. He, too, had gotten the Nobel Prize partly for not being George W Bush, partly for a disaster horror film, but no Democrat wants to share a podium with him. No one under thirty knows what “Tipper was right” means.
As a result, those under thirty should understand that this book does not describe your parents’ George W. Bush. As 9/11 fades from our memory and the Arab Spring turns into Winter, even the consensus on Afghanistan and Iraq is changing. This is inevitable. As time passes, our understanding the past and our appreciation of the personalities changes. Keeping up with this seems impossible until all at once we say about the revised history, “that seems right.”
We are not at that point yet, but the public no longer believes claims by the Obama administration that its problems are the legacy of George W. Bush.
Review-Atlas (May 29, 2014), 4.
