by James Mann
Paulson launched a campaign to eradicate the word “bailout” from public discourse. He called the two rival presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama, to urge them to refrain from calling the administration’s action with respect to AIG a “bailout,” maintaining that the word was a pejorative and inflamed public debate. Bush, too, sought to discourage the word, observing that the administration’s actions did not seem like a bailout to the shareholders who lost most of their investments. Such arguments did not change the reality that for the larger purpose of rescuing the overall economy, the government was indeed committing taxpayers’ money to save the companies, actions that fit the common meaning of “bailouts.”
Over the following weeks, the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve took one unprecedented step after another. The Treasury Department used federal emergency money to guarantee money-market funds, so that they would not face a run on deposits and would be able to hold their net asset value of $1 a share. The Securities and Exchange Commission temporarily banned short-selling in nearly eight hundred financial stocks. Wall Street’s remaining investment banks were converted into bank holding companies, bringing them under the supervision and protection of the Federal Reserve, whose strict rules would limit their ability to use leverage to make risky investments.
All of these were measures the Bush administration was able to take on its own, together with the Federal Reserve, which, though independent, was coordinating its actions with Treasury. The most significant, expensive government intervention, however, required Bush to seek new legislation. Four days after the Lehman bankruptcy, Paulson announced that the Bush administration was seeking money from Congress to buy up the toxic assets the banks possessed stemming from mortgage securities.
This new program was called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Paulson had initially told Bush he needed at least $500 billion, but Bush had asked, “Is that enough?” After realizing Congress would never approve $1 trillion, they somewhat arbitrarily settled on the final figure of $700 billion. It would be the single biggest expenditure in the history of the federal government.
Bush launched a concentrated lobbying campaign to round up the votes for TARP, with administration officials arguing that the funds were needed to prevent a repeat of the Great Depression. But the proposal proved extremely unpopular, and ten days after it was unveiled the House of Representatives voted it down, 228 to 205.
In political terms, this first TARP vote was a bellwether. It demonstrated how little influence Bush wielded near the end of his presidency, particularly within his own party. Only sixty-five Republicans, fewer than a third of the party’s caucus in the House, voted to support the president. Bush had not even managed to win over a single Republican in the delegation from Texas, his home state. The vote also represented the first demonstration of what would later be called the Tea Party movement. On TARP, Republicans in Congress rejected the views of most of the business community as well as those of moderate Republican leaders and launched out in the direction of a new form of economic populism.
However, it turned out that Congress could not live with the devastating impact of its own vote. Later that day, September 29, 2008, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped by 778 points, the largest one-day decline in its history. Bush and his advisers quickly decided to try again, and four days later the bill passed, 263 to 171. Even in this turnaround vote, the Republican rejection of Bush was clear: of the fifty-seven members of Congress who changed their votes from no to yes, thirty-three were Democrats.
* * *
In the midst of the financial upheavals, Obama and McCain were waging their general election campaigns to succeed Bush. The financial crisis and the two candidates’ handling of it proved influential to the outcome. Paulson was briefing both candidates regularly; he found Obama to be thoughtful and supportive, while McCain worried him with populist-sounding rhetoric more attuned to the views of the Republican base.
At one critical juncture, McCain announced he was suspending his campaign and called for a bipartisan White House summit meeting to discuss the financial crisis. Administration officials were not enthusiastic about this idea, but Bush felt he couldn’t say no to McCain. At the meeting the following day, Bush warned the participants of the need to act quickly, describing the situation in Texas vernacular: “If money isn’t loosened up, this sucker could go down.” Bush called on Obama, who calmly emphasized the gravity of the crisis and the need to get the TARP bill enacted. But when the president then asked for a Republican response from McCain, he declined to talk, saying he would pass until later. Eventually, he spoke briefly but said he was speaking only for himself rather than the party, evidently because of the intense divisions among the Republicans. Bush and Cheney were dumbfounded. Cheney, ordinarily no fan of Obama, later wrote that in that particular session the Democratic candidate was “very much at ease and in command of the situation,” while McCain “added nothing of substance.” The conference deteriorated into bickering between Republican and Democratic leaders and resolved nothing. It ended when Bush finally stood up and declared, “Well, I’ve clearly lost control of this meeting. It’s over.”
For McCain, it was a disaster, and nothing he did in the following weeks could turn things around. On Election Day, Obama won with relative ease. American voters decided that after Bush, the next occupant of the White House should be a Democrat.
* * *
Bush was now reduced to the role of lame duck. Even so, the financial crisis meant that there was still quite a bit of history to be made, even in his final two months. In October, in a meeting at Camp David, French president Nicolas Sarkozy had asked Bush to convene a meeting of the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan, and Russia—the so-called G-8 nations, a well-established group whose roots dated back to the 1970s—to steer responses to the crisis. Bush spurned this idea and instead convened the first-ever summit of leaders of the so-called G-20, a larger group of economies that included China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea. The groundbreaking session, held ten days after the American election, paved the way for seven further such summits over the following five years. The Obama administration would later portray Obama’s emphasis on the G-20 as part of his effort to shift America’s focus away from the old European powers and toward the rest of the world, but in fact it was Bush who took the first step.
During his final two months, Bush found himself approving several more rescues of leading American companies. In doing so, he vented his frustration. When told about Treasury Department plans to commit still more federal money to save AIG, Bush blurted out, “Are you asking me or telling me this is going to happen?” Paulson replied, “I’m telling you this is going to happen, Mr. President.”
Once again, Bush was not going to interfere or to get involved in the details. Nevertheless, he continued to set the overall guidance. When told in mid-November that Citigroup was on the verge of failure and needed federal help, Bush at first voiced shock but eventually told Paulson, “Just don’t let Citi fail.”
In December, he took another far-reaching step by extending the series of bailouts from banking and financial institutions to the auto industry. Earlier that fall, car executives had informed Paulson they were facing bankruptcy, because their credit was drying up and suppliers were reluctant to keep doing business with them. A postelection effort to get help from Congress failed. Bush was faced with either opening the way for TARP funds for the car companies or allowing them to slide into bankruptcy in the weeks before he left office.
Prominent Republicans and conservatives, including Cheney, opposed any government intervention to rescue Detroit. Bush overrode their objections; he approved short-term loans from TARP funds of $13.4 billion for General Motors and $4 billion for Chrysler. One factor was his desire to avoid leaving Obama with an even more desperate economic situation than he would already face. The other was Bush’s larger, continuing desire to avoid being remembered as another Herbert H
oover. “I had to safeguard American workers and families from a widespread collapse,” he wrote. Any semblance of a commitment to laissez-faire economic policies, which Bush had proclaimed throughout his career, was gone after the auto bailouts.
* * *
There was one last piece of unresolved business, and it consumed Bush’s final days as president. Like many of his predecessors, he was besieged by requests from individuals seeking presidential pardons for their crimes. Bill Clinton’s last days in the presidency had been besmirched by his granting of a wave of pardons to friends, campaign donors, political figures, and even his half brother. Bush’s father had granted six former senior officials pardons for their roles in the Iran-Contra affair.
For George W. Bush, the debate over last-minute pardons boiled down to a single individual: Scooter Libby, Cheney’s former chief of staff. Libby had been convicted in 2007 on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice and had been sentenced to thirty months in prison. Bush had commuted the prison sentence a few months later. However, throughout Bush’s final weeks in office, Cheney repeatedly pressed hard for a full presidential pardon for Libby.
Bush agonized. The president who called himself “the decider,” suggesting he made choices easily, spent the final weekend of his presidency at Camp David agonizing over what to do about Libby. “Just make up your mind,” Laura Bush told him. “You’re ruining this for everyone.” Finally, he decided to leave the jury’s verdict on Libby in effect. When he told the vice president there would be no pardon, Cheney was infuriated, telling Bush he was “leaving a good man wounded on the field of battle.” Even years later, Cheney would complain that Bush had lacked courage in failing to pardon Libby.
* * *
On January 20, 2009, George W. Bush spent his final hours as president in an America he never could have envisioned eight years earlier. Overseas, the United States was engaged in two wars. At home, despite the flurry of rescue efforts over the previous four months, the economy was still on the verge of collapse; in merely the single week before Bush left office, 524,000 more Americans signed up for unemployment benefits. Even the inauguration ceremonies that marked his final moments in office included a reminder of the upheavals of his tenure: Bush’s aides had to warn the Obama team about reports of a terrorist attack on the event (which never materialized).
After Obama was sworn in, Bush, joined by friends and family, left Washington and flew home to Texas, the place with which he had always identified and where he always felt most comfortable. His trouble-filled presidency was over.
Epilogue
Of the ex-presidents in the modern era, George W. Bush was among the most private. He did not seek to insert himself into international diplomacy, like Jimmy Carter, nor to speak out on a range of issues, like Bill Clinton. He did not seek to rehabilitate his image by casting himself as an elder statesman, in the fashion of Richard Nixon.
While maintaining their ranch in Crawford, he and Laura settled into a new home they purchased in a wealthy neighborhood in North Dallas. In the early years after the White House, he preoccupied himself with the two basic tasks that all former presidents confront: his memoir and his presidential library. The memoir, Decision Points, was published in 2010, at a time when American troops were still in Iraq and the debates over Bush’s counterterrorism measures were still raging. The book rekindled much of the rancor of the Bush presidency. Bush offered some admissions of error—his “bring ’em on” rhetoric and his handling of Katrina, for example—but also many defenses of his policies, enough to bring forth a wave of angry rebuttals. (The book found an audience, too, as it reached the top of the bestseller list and sold more than 2 million copies.)
In contrast, the ceremonies in 2013 to open the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum seemed to generate a certain mellowing in attitudes toward Bush, as various dignitaries tiptoed over the controversial aspects of his presidency in order to praise his personal qualities. “To know the man is to like the man, because he’s comfortable in his own skin. He knows who he is. He doesn’t put on any pretense,” said President Barack Obama at the library opening. “He doesn’t take himself too seriously. He is a good man.” The Bush library, located at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, contained one feature unique for presidential libraries: an exhibit in which visitors are shown the key issues Bush faced and the often-conflicting views of his advisers. Visitors are then asked to choose which option they would take. Thus, the Bush presidency was transformed from “I’m the decider” to “You decide.”
Bush traveled widely. He and his wife continued to visit Africa on behalf of PEPFAR, the program he established to combat AIDS. Indeed, that program emerged as the most universally admired aspect of the Bush legacy. At the library ceremonies, Bill Clinton thanked Bush for PEPFAR and asserted that “millions of people” are alive today because of the program, adding mordantly, “No president of my party could have passed that through the Congress.” The singer-turned-activist Bono, who was instrumental in persuading the Bush administration to launch the program, had once teased Bush that as a result of PEPFAR the U.S. government had become the world’s largest purchaser of condoms. Bush laughed; he later recorded the conversation in Decision Points. Still, there were places and events overseas that Bush avoided for political reasons: in 2011, he canceled what would have been his first postpresidential trip to Europe, a speech in Geneva, because human rights groups planned major demonstrations and said they would try to arrest him.
Before leaving the White House, Bush had told one interviewer that when he stepped down he planned to make money to “replenish the ol’ coffers.” He went at that task determinedly, following Clinton’s example, by amassing millions of dollars through speaking appearances. With the help of a speakers bureau, he offered his services at $150,000. He often spoke to banks, hedge funds, trade groups, and similar private audiences, on occasion appearing together with Clinton. By mid-2011, two and a half years after leaving office, Bush’s spokesman said he had delivered 140 paid talks, earning fees of at least $15 million.
In these speeches and other public appearances, however, Bush generally tried to avoid commenting on the issues of the day. Former vice president Dick Cheney emerged as the principal defender of the Bush administration’s policies and as the leading critic of the Obama administration. Bush sought to avoid that role. “I think it’s bad for the country to have former presidents out there undermining the current president,” Bush explained. With a few exceptions, he refrained from public debate. One exception was the topic of immigration reform. Bush had consistently been pro-immigration throughout his career, and he remained outspokenly so after leaving the White House. He supported efforts in Congress to reform the immigration system, noting with regret that he had been unable to win passage of such legislation during his presidency. The other exception was internationalism: although the former president offered few opinions about specific foreign-policy issues, he warned against any broader drift by the United States toward isolationism.
As usual, he devoted considerable time to the affairs of the extended Bush family. His parents’ health had begun to decline. He and his father were the first father-and-son pair of living ex-presidents in American history; John Adams had died while John Quincy Adams was still in the White House. The younger ex-president wrote an extended tribute to the older one: the book 41: A Portrait of My Father, about the life and career of George H. W. Bush, was published in 2014. Meanwhile, the Bush clan was continuing to grow. In 2013, Bush became a grandfather when his daughter Jenna Bush Hager gave birth to a daughter, Mila.
In one bizarre episode, a computer expert based in Romania hacked into the email accounts of various members of the Bush family and began leaking them to American websites. The emails contained some prosaic exchanges among George W. Bush and his siblings, such as early planning for a funeral for their father, who was in poor health at the time. However, the hacked accounts contained one surprise revelation: in his postpresidenti
al years, George W. Bush had taken up painting. The emails included photos Bush had mailed to his sister of some of his art. These included standard portraits of dogs and other animals but also other, unusual self-portraits that fit no conventional genre. One of them showed Bush’s torso from the back as he stood in the shower, and another showed his feet as he lay in the bathtub. These quirky paintings, which had not been intended for public display, led to a wave of positive commentary. “OMG! Pigs fly. I like something about George W. Bush. A lot,” wrote New York magazine’s art critic Jerry Saltz. Bush acknowledged that he had been painting for as much as five to six hours a day, helped by an instructor who came to his home once a week.
The painting started when “he was desperate for a pastime,” explained Laura Bush. “So John Lewis Gaddis, the historian from Yale, happened to be in Dallas, and they were talking. George said he was looking for a pastime now that he was home, and he said, ‘Well, read [Winston] Churchill’s book Painting as a Pastime.’ So George did.” George W. Bush told another interviewer: “Painting has changed my life in an unbelievably positive way.” A year later, he put on exhibition in the Bush library a series of portraits of world leaders he had met, including Tony Blair, the Dalai Lama, Hamid Karzai, and Vladimir Putin.
Politically, Bush remained beyond the pale of respectability, even for Republicans, for years after leaving the White House. Always unpopular with the political left, he had also come to be spurned by the political right. Pointing to his extension of Medicare to cover prescription drugs and, especially, to the TARP program during the financial crisis, conservatives condemned Bush as a supporter of big government. At the Republican National Convention in 2012, Bush appeared only by video, as he had in 2008; the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, was no more eager to be identified with Bush than John McCain had been four years earlier.
Since well before leaving the White House, Bush seemed to have yearned for a quiet existence as ex-president, one where he would no longer be in the spotlight. In 2006, as Bush was preparing to deliver his annual address to the U.N. General Assembly, he crossed paths with Bill Clinton in the lobby of the U.N. building. Afterward, Bush told one of his aides: “Six years from now, you’re not going to see me hanging out in the lobby of the U.N.”
