by James Mann
THE AMERICAN PRESIDENTS SERIES
Joyce Appleby on Thomas Jefferson
Louis Auchincloss on Theodore Roosevelt
Jean H. Baker on James Buchanan
H. W. Brands on Woodrow Wilson
Alan Brinkley on John F. Kennedy
Douglas Brinkley on Gerald R. Ford
Josiah Bunting III on Ulysses S. Grant
James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn on George Washington
Charles W. Calhoun on Benjamin Harrison
Gail Collins on William Henry Harrison
Robert Dallek on Harry S. Truman
John W. Dean on Warren G. Harding
John Patrick Diggins on John Adams
Elizabeth Drew on Richard M. Nixon
John S. D. Eisenhower on Zachary Taylor
Paul Finkelman on Millard Fillmore
Annette Gordon-Reed on Andrew Johnson
Henry F. Graff on Grover Cleveland
David Greenberg on Calvin Coolidge
Gary Hart on James Monroe
Michael F. Holt on Franklin Pierce
Roy Jenkins on Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Zachary Karabell on Chester Alan Arthur
William E. Leuchtenburg on Herbert Hoover
James Mann on George W. Bush
Gary May on John Tyler
George McGovern on Abraham Lincoln
Timothy Naftali on George H. W. Bush
Charles Peters on Lyndon B. Johnson
Kevin Phillips on William McKinley
Robert V. Remini on John Quincy Adams
Jeffrey Rosen on William Howard Taft
Ira Rutkow on James A. Garfield
John Seigenthaler on James K. Polk
Hans L. Trefousse on Rutherford B. Hayes
Jacob Weisberg on Ronald Reagan
Tom Wicker on Dwight D. Eisenhower
Ted Widmer on Martin Van Buren
Sean Wilentz on Andrew Jackson
Garry Wills on James Madison
Julian E. Zelizer on Jimmy Carter
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To Nate, Ben, and Ryan
Contents
The American Presidents Series
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Editor’s Note
Prologue
1. “A Good-Time Guy”
2. The Rising Politician
3. The New President and His Tax Cuts
4. September 11
5. Iraq
6. Reelection and Its Unhappy Aftermath
7. Second-Term Changes
8. “I’m Going to Be Roosevelt, Not Hoover”
Epilogue
Notes
Milestones
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
Also by James Mann
About the Author
Copyright
Editor’s Note
THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY
The president is the central player in the American political order. That would seem to contradict the intentions of the Founding Fathers. Remembering the horrid example of the British monarchy, they invented a separation of powers in order, as Justice Brandeis later put it, “to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power.” Accordingly, they divided the government into three allegedly equal and coordinate branches—the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary.
But a system based on the tripartite separation of powers has an inherent tendency toward inertia and stalemate. One of the three branches must take the initiative if the system is to move. The executive branch alone is structurally capable of taking that initiative. The Founders must have sensed this when they accepted Alexander Hamilton’s proposition in the Seventieth Federalist that “energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.” They thus envisaged a strong president—but within an equally strong system of constitutional accountability. (The term imperial presidency arose in the 1970s to describe the situation when the balance between power and accountability is upset in favor of the executive.)
The American system of self-government thus comes to focus in the presidency—“the vital place of action in the system,” as Woodrow Wilson put it. Henry Adams, himself the great-grandson and grandson of presidents as well as the most brilliant of American historians, said that the American president “resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.” The men in the White House (thus far only men, alas) in steering their chosen courses have shaped our destiny as a nation.
Biography offers an easy education in American history, rendering the past more human, more vivid, more intimate, more accessible, more connected to ourselves. Biography reminds us that presidents are not supermen. They are human beings too, worrying about decisions, attending to wives and children, juggling balls in the air, and putting on their pants one leg at a time. Indeed, as Emerson contended, “There is properly no history; only biography.”
Presidents serve us as inspirations, and they also serve us as warnings. They provide bad examples as well as good. The nation, the Supreme Court has said, has “no right to expect that it will always have wise and humane rulers, sincerely attached to the principles of the Constitution. Wicked men, ambitious of power, with hatred of liberty and contempt of law, may fill the place once occupied by Washington and Lincoln.”
The men in the White House express the ideals and the values, the frailties and the flaws, of the voters who send them there. It is altogether natural that we should want to know more about the virtues and the vices of the fellows we have elected to govern us. As we know more about them, we will know more about ourselves. The French political philosopher Joseph de Maistre said, “Every nation has the government it deserves.”
At the start of the twenty-first century, forty-two men have made it to the Oval Office. (George W. Bush is counted our forty-third president, because Grover Cleveland, who served nonconsecutive terms, is counted twice.) Of the parade of presidents, a dozen or so lead the polls periodically conducted by historians and political scientists. What makes a great president?
Great presidents possess, or are possessed by, a vision of an ideal America. Their passion, as they grasp the helm, is to set the ship of state on the right course toward the port they seek. Great presidents also have a deep psychic connection with the needs, anxieties, dreams of people. “I do not believe,” said Wilson, “that any man can lead who does not act … under the impulse of a profound sympathy with those whom he leads—a sympathy which is insight—an insight which is of the heart rather than of the intellect.”
“All of our great presidents,” said Franklin D. Roosevelt, “were leaders of thought at a time when certain ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.” So Washington incarnated the idea of federal union, Jefferson and Jackson the idea of democracy, Lincoln union and freedom, Cleveland rugged honesty. Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson, said FDR, were both “moral leaders, each in his own way and his own time, who used the presidency as a pulpit.”
To succeed, presidents not only must have a port to seek but they must convince Congress and the electorate that it is a port worth seeking. Politics in a democracy is ultimately an educ
ational process, an adventure in persuasion and consent. Every president stands in Theodore Roosevelt’s bully pulpit.
The greatest presidents in the scholars’ rankings, Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, were leaders who confronted and overcame the republic’s greatest crises. Crisis widens presidential opportunities for bold and imaginative action. But it does not guarantee presidential greatness. The crisis of secession did not spur Buchanan or the crisis of depression spur Hoover to creative leadership. Their inadequacies in the face of crisis allowed Lincoln and the second Roosevelt to show the difference individuals make to history. Still, even in the absence of first-order crisis, forceful and persuasive presidents—Jefferson, Jackson, James K. Polk, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush—are able to impose their own priorities on the country.
The diverse drama of the presidency offers a fascinating set of tales. Biographies of American presidents constitute a chronicle of wisdom and folly, nobility and pettiness, courage and cunning, forthrightness and deceit, quarrel and consensus. The turmoil perennially swirling around the White House illuminates the heart of the American democracy.
It is the aim of the American Presidents series to present the grand panorama of our chief executives in volumes compact enough for the busy reader, lucid enough for the student, authoritative enough for the scholar. Each volume offers a distillation of character and career. I hope that these lives will give readers some understanding of the pitfalls and potentialities of the presidency and also of the responsibilities of citizenship. Truman’s famous sign—“The buck stops here”—tells only half the story. Citizens cannot escape the ultimate responsibility. It is in the voting booth, not on the presidential desk, that the buck finally stops.
—Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Prologue
During the 2000 presidential campaign, it was frequently said of George W. Bush that he had almost never set foot outside the United States. News articles repeatedly specified that, other than Mexico, he had made only three trips outside the United States in his life: one to China; one to Rome, Israel, and Egypt; and one to Gambia to represent his father’s administration. Commentators often rehashed this reporting, taking this skimpy list as evidence of his seeming provinciality and lack of curiosity.
Thus, I was quite startled when, in writing a previous book about George W. Bush’s foreign-policy team, I ran across a casual remark Bush made in 2003 on the eve of a presidential trip to Britain. The interviewer David Frost asked if this was Bush’s first visit to London. “I’ve been there a couple of times,” Bush answered. “I remember Laura and I went to see ‘Cats’ in London. Gosh, I remember going to some nice pubs in London.” Some further checking turned up the information that Bush had, in fact, made several trips to Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, stopping in London, Scotland, Paris, Spain, and Portugal, among other places, mostly as part of a business group, the Young Presidents’ Organization. He and his advisers did not bother to correct the news stories in the 2000 campaign; if the impression formed that he was unsophisticated, that was of little concern (and could even help with some voters).
That episode provides a fitting introduction to the life of George W. Bush. With Bush, appearances were frequently deceiving. He styled himself as a common man and tough-talking Texan, yet he came from a world of wealth, private schooling, and privilege. He was among the most unpopular of U.S. presidents, reviled by millions of Americans, yet those who met him in person usually found him to be likable and charming. He was caricatured as stupid, an impression furthered by his many malapropisms, yet those who worked with or for him often reported him to be surprisingly canny. Politically, too, impressions of Bush were often misleading: he held himself out as a strong conservative yet, in the end, he angered the political right with big-government programs such as Medicare prescription drug benefits and the TARP program during the financial crisis.
He was only the second president in American history whose father had previously held the job, following the path of John Quincy Adams in the early nineteenth century. His relationship with his father, George H. W. Bush, had often been a preoccupying factor in his life. When he was a boy, he was sometimes known as Little George. When he first became involved in politics, helping out in his father’s political campaigns, he was called Junior, a name he disliked. Eventually, the nickname that stuck for years was the middle initial that distinguished him from his father: he was “W” (or, in Texas, “Dub-ya”).
Once, while his father was vice president, he heard someone speak casually about the difficulties of being a “PK,” a preacher’s kid. “You think that’s tough?” asked Bush, who was then nearly forty years old. “Try being a VPK [a vice president’s kid].” Soon after his father became president, George W. Bush ordered a campaign adviser to prepare a written report for him on what happened to the children of American presidents. The survey found that while a few went on to successful careers, many others were ne’er-do-wells, damaged by the burden of their powerful, successful fathers.
The fact that he was a president’s son hovered in the background throughout George W. Bush’s presidency. It sometimes colored how his policies were perceived and portrayed. When he first came to the White House, his presidency was said to be a “retread” of his father’s administration. Later on, after he carried out policies very different from those of his father, the commentary changed: it was said that he must somehow harbor some sort of oedipal resentment.
Bush himself showed signs of sensitivity on this subject. “The one somewhat touchy area between us—never openly discussed—was my close relationship to the president’s father,” wrote Robert M. Gates, Bush’s second defense secretary, who had previously held senior positions in the George H. W. Bush administration. When Gates was first approached about the Pentagon job in late 2006 and was asked to talk with the president, he first consulted quietly with Bush’s father. Soon he proceeded to an interview with George W. Bush, who told Gates, wrongly, that his father didn’t know the job offer was in the works.
Nevertheless, George H. W. Bush turned out to be largely irrelevant to George W. Bush’s presidency. The younger Bush confronted a series of problems his father never faced, ranging from the September 11 attacks to Hurricane Katrina to the global financial crisis. And by the time the president left office, his father was an afterthought. George W. Bush became undeniably his own man, launching initiatives and making mistakes that were all his own, arousing passions both positive and negative of the sort that his father never attracted.
* * *
George W. Bush was president at a critical juncture in American history. The attacks of September 11 marked the only time since Pearl Harbor or the War of 1812 that there was a direct foreign attack on American soil. That day brought to an end the sense of calm, security, and triumphalism that had prevailed in the United States following the end of the cold war.
America had entered the new millennium at the peak of its power. At home, the U.S. economy had grown rapidly through the 1990s; one of the reigning economic questions at the time Bush took office was what to do about the large surpluses the federal budget was running. On the world stage, America faced no serious rival as a global power.
Eight years later, at the end of Bush’s term, the United States was struggling to regain its stature abroad and its prosperity at home. The actions Bush took were often (though not always) a contributing factor in the country’s reversal of fortune. The question of what might have happened if someone else were president is the sort of counterfactual that can be debated endlessly. There can be no doubt, however, that Bush’s presidency marked a troubled entry into the twenty-first century for the United States and a turning point in its self-confident approach to the world. It was, by any standard, one of the most consequential presidencies in American history.
1
“A Good-Time Guy”
The family of George W. Bush had prospered since the nineteenth century on
its close connections, first to American manufacturing and finance and then, eventually, to politics. George W. Bush’s great-grandfather Samuel Bush was a railroad and steel executive. His grandfather Prescott Bush was a prominent Wall Street investment banker who was later elected to the U.S. Senate from Connecticut in 1952. His father, George H. W. Bush, became an oil executive in his early adult years, prior to entering politics, at first unsuccessfully, before finally rising to be president of the United States.
At the time George W. Bush was born, his father, then twenty-two years old, was still an undergraduate at Yale University, completing his college education after service in World War II. His twenty-one-year-old mother, a former debutante named Barbara Pierce, had had a difficult pregnancy, having gained more than sixty pounds, and was unable to deliver until, on her mother-in-law’s advice, she finally took some castor oil. It worked. George W. Bush was born on July 6, 1946, in New Haven, Connecticut, a town that would years later come to symbolize his lifetime resentment of East Coast elites and intellectuals.
The baby was nicknamed Georgie. He became, in his mother’s words, “a much beloved and slightly spoiled little boy.” When he was two, his parents moved to West Texas as his father forsook Wall Street to pursue a career in the oil business. He was offered a job as a trainee in Texas by one of his own father’s business partners.
The Bushes moved first to Odessa, Texas, and then settled in 1950 in the town of Midland, a hot, dusty city that lay over the mammoth oil and gas fields of the Permian Basin. They spent the entire decade of the 1950s in Midland, participating fully in its weekly rituals: Friday nights at the high school football games, Sunday mornings at church, Mondays on foot to the local public school.
For his parents, raised in privileged enclaves in Greenwich, Connecticut, and Rye, New York, relocation to Texas was simply a career move and stepping-stone. By contrast, for George W. Bush, who spent his entire childhood there, Midland carried far deeper significance, lodging itself at the core of his personality, his worldview, his cultural outlook, and, eventually, his political identity. The younger Bush portrayed himself to the public as someone distant from the sophisticated lands of the East and West Coasts. In his own self-image, growing up in Midland was what distinguished him from his father. Even as George W. attended private schools and elite Eastern universities and benefited from his family’s name and connections, he always emphasized his West Texas roots. As a rising politician, when he was asked how he was different from his father, he would often reply: “I went to Sam Houston Elementary School in Midland, Texas, and he went to Greenwich Country Day School in Connecticut.” On occasion, he even portrayed Texas’s biggest cities as outside his realm. In 1995, on his first day as governor, Bush told a Texas state legislator, “Just remember, I’m from Midland, not Dallas.” He became skilled, indeed shrewd, at assuming the role of the small-town Texas country boy.
