I have never heard a better rendition of what I see as our unique American attitude. Or a sharper measure of the distance ordinary people feel from the economic and educated elites. Or a finer explanation of why, even with last year’s then still-booming economy as his trump card, Al Gore isn’t in the White House. Or why, when a real political gusher blows in this country, the establishment’s finest always will be the last to yell. Or why, thank God, a guy with a partisan rap sheet like mine has earned the trust of so many conservatives, independents, and liberals as well who, like me, know just what Leroy Taylor was talking about.
George W. Bush
Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Few presidents are given the historic duty to lead America through a crisis like the World Trade Center horror. Not since Vietnam had the country felt so violated. Not since World War II had we felt such resolve. We wanted orders and we looked to one man to give them.
In the days following September 11, 2001, George W. Bush displayed a presidential command that warmed his supporters and impressed even his nastiest critics. Championing America’s ardor, he launched a global campaign against terrorism.
“Tonight we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom,” he told the Congress and the country. “Our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.”
In Bush, the country discovered it had a young leader rising to the occasion, an easy-going Prince Hal transformed by instinct and circumstance into a warrior King Henry. A president who once suffered daily questions about his legitimacy now commanded the backing of nine in ten Americans. No president in modern time had captured such overwhelming loyalty in a matter of such historic peril.
It was not the first time Bush displayed an unexpected audacity. In 1994, he took on Texas governor Ann Richards when she was a national icon, and beat her. When he saw the TV networks prematurely calling Florida for Al Gore in 2000, he invited the national cameras into the family hotel suite. There, in the presence of the former president and first lady, parents George and Barbara, he scolded the press into backing down. “The people actually counting the votes have come to a different perspective,” he told the country, especially those supporters in the western states still heading to the polls. “I’m pretty darn upbeat about things.”
Had events gone a little differently that night, George W. Bush could have been barbecued by the media for hiding behind Daddy and Mommy. It was such a personal call on his part that I credit him with bold leadership. With that single risky performance he changed the election night’s dynamic. Instead of being seen as a loser the morning after and throughout the five weeks of recounts and legal arguments, the man hunkered down on his Texas farm seemed to most Americans like the winner.
So we knew Bush had nerve. What we wondered about was how much depth there was to the guy. Was he more cerebral than he seemed? Was he a sneaky “grind” who went off and studied things when nobody was looking? Did he possess some special instinct for leadership, some unexplained knack for calling the shots under pressure?
Like so many others, I carried this conflicted view of George W. Bush right into the World Trade Center and Pentagon crisis. Remember what I said after that third presidential debate with Al Gore? I said Bush was “not prepared to be president in many ways.” I still think that was a fair assessment. There were things this son of a president didn’t know, didn’t have the curiosity to learn. At times it seemed that others, led by Vice President Cheney, were calling the shots.
One reason for this perception may be Bush’s executive style. As a manager, he follows the “hidden hand” pattern of President Eisenhower. Like Ike, he has filled his cabinet with CEOs and governors. Like Ike, he invested in each cabinet member. Look at the way Bush handled the Chinese government’s retention of the downed EP3 reconnaissance plane. He left it to Colin Powell to use the language and cultural expertise of the State Department to find the right words to appease Beijing. Then, once the crewmen were home, he let Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld defend the honor, performance, and morale of the military by telling the world that our guys were right, the Chinese fighter pilot was wrong.
But for many months in 2001 the new presidency seemed to stall. With an entire country ready to know and like him, Bush clung to familiar company, familiar geography, familiar thinking. He acted as if the only Republicans were southern Republicans. Why did he spend so much time down on his Texas ranch when he could have been forging new alliances that could give him a clear majority in 2004? “I’m amongst friends in Texas,” he said, in explaining his month-long trip home in August 2001. But couldn’t he have been making friends up in places like the Philly suburbs, near where I grew up?
I have to admit that during that August vacation in Texas, Bush managed to pull a head-fake on the American press corps. Under the cover of a four-week vacation, he delivered a prime-time speech on stem cell research that won a 70 percent approval rating. Even more successful were his Jimmy Carter-like house building with Habitat for Humanity and his Ronald Reagan-like brush clearing in the Rockies. Those who denigrate such vivid imagery as “form over function” ignore how this Yale-educated cowboy got his job.
I noticed something else about George W. He was operating at a 180 degree angle from his father. The forty-first president raised taxes; the forty-third couldn’t wait to lower them. Forty-one emphasized foreign policy; forty-three began his presidency with a narrow focus on the home front. The father kept remote from the religious right. The son has kept this particular alliance fresh.
HERE’S WHAT I REALLY THINK: Every time you lower the bar on this fellow, the easier it becomes for him to clear it.
When he spoke to the nation about stem cells, for example, President George W. Bush admitted right up front that such issues are not solvable by brainpower alone. Good people disagree on the subject. Nobody’s necessarily right, nobody’s necessarily been proven wrong. We’re all in this together, trying to square our religious views with our medical hopes, our deepest human values with our scientific potential.
Before the World Trade Center and Pentagon tragedies, however, Bush had failed to project a clear sense of national purpose. There was no music to his presidency. I’m talking about that optimistic cadence that has lifted the nation in the past. I’m talking about an American mission.
On September 11, 2001, that mission was thrust upon him. Through instinct and compassion, he stood in the rubble of the World Trade Center and forged an almost sacramental bond with the American people. Surrounded by New York firemen, he seemed exactly where he belonged.
“I will not forget this wound to our country, or those who inflicted it,” he told the country later. “I will not yield. I will not rest. I will not relent in waging this struggle for the freedom and security of the American people.” As no president before he united the American people on a course of both purpose and peril.
Whether success for the country and greatness for the president will follow depends on history not yet written.
CHAPTER TWO
The Man with the Sun in His Face
All men dream; but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.
T. E. LAWRENCE, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Professors of political science—talk about an oxymoron!—like to construct elaborate formulae to predict our elections. You can tell how many previous models failed by the number of variables required in the latest.
My model has just one variable: Look for the candidate you picture with the sun in his face.
I present to you a slide show:
FDR arriving in his open roadster to visit the tr
oops
Harry Truman giving ’em hell from the back of a train
Ike riding down the canyons of Wall Street, the ticker tape streaming down from the high-floored windows, his hands raised up with the V-sign, his smile as wide as Kansas
JFK looking like a million bucks, hand-combing his hair off his forehead, a crowd of “jumpers” straining to get a look at his gleaming teeth, his Palm Beach–tanned face
Ronald Reagan standing on the bluffs of Normandy paying grand tribute to the boys of Point de Hoc or clearing brush in cowboy denim at his Rancho del Cielo
These are the hero presidents. We think of them with the full flush of the outdoors shining on their cheeks.
And the losers: Tom Dewey, Adlai Stevenson, Mike Dukakis, Al Gore. We think of them, when we think of them at all, as men in blue suits behind desks.
Sometimes, as in the 1968 face-off between Dick Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, the sun is nowhere to be found. Sometimes we pick a windswept winner only to see him degenerate into a desk jockey. A confident, sunburned farmer in ’76, Jimmy Carter became a workaholic prisoner of the Rose Garden. A man running as Ronald Reagan’s third term, George Herbert Walker Bush, became instead a D.C.-based backroom banker.
In modern elections we get the chance to see and hear what a candidate is really like, and this intimate scrutiny makes voting an increasingly personal decision. We root for the guy running against the “suits,” the guy we can imagine suitless himself.
Think, if you can, of Bill Clinton the first time we met him, the gung-ho boomer leaping full-grown from the heartland into our consciousness. Think of George W. Bush who, despite his patrician origins and Yale degree, ran successfully as a Texas cowboy against the bland and bookish Gore. Although we Americans may vote indoors, we seem to want to elect presidents with the look, feel, and freshness of America the beautiful. It connects with our blue-skies optimism, perhaps even to something deep in our national myth.
HERE’S WHAT I REALLY THINK: Want to pick the winner next time? Find the man with the sun in his face. If Bush gets driven indoors, is forced to defend his job by posing in the Oval Office, bet on the other guy. If he retains his outside-the-Beltway persona, bet on the incumbent.
* * *
When friends come to Washington these days, I take them, often late at night, to visit the new Franklin Roosevelt monument on the Tidal Basin. I take them there, but I don’t really like it. It must be the moonlit geography that invites me back. It’s definitely not the message. Whoever built this memorial decided somehow that it would be a great idea to commemorate the grimness of the Great Depression. There are statues of mournful men waiting in breadlines. There’s FDR sitting in his wheelchair, images not of what Roosevelt achieved but of what he was up against.
I hate it, and I’m sure the great man himself would have hated it. It would be like naming an IRS building after Ronald Reagan. Why didn’t the FDR Memorial planners go all the way and add to the site depictions of Japanese Zeroes dropping bombs on Pearl Harbor or Hitler marching through Poland?
HERE’S WHAT I REALLY THINK: Want to see a real monument to Franklin Roosevelt? It’s the Social Security system that he insisted be financed by workers and employers alike. It’s the free enterprise system he saved by that “bold and timely experimentation” of his, otherwise known as the New Deal.
If FDR had been as downbeat as this morbid memorial—a project, I might add, that he asked not be undertaken anyhow—he never would have been elected in the first place. We vote our dreams when we elect presidents, not our nightmares. If you don’t get that about we Americans you don’t get us. To save the “forgotten man” in 1932 we chose a winner, a fellow riding in an open roadster, his cigarette holder jutting skyward at a neat forty-five degrees.
“Meeting Franklin Roosevelt,” his war ally Winston Churchill once wrote, “was like having your first glass of champagne.” “A man with a third-class mind but a first-class temperament,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes.
It was that upbeat temperament of his that made all the difference both at home and in war. Columnist Joseph Alsop wrote of being in Hong Kong the day after Pearl Harbor and listening, as the Japanese bombs fell, to Roosevelt address Congress:
The radio was so faulty that I had to lie on the floor with my head just under it in order to hear much of anything. I got the president’s drift, which was easy enough to predict in any case, but I caught no more than one word in two—hardly more than enough to be reminded of the timbre of his voice. Yet in these fairly gloomy and frustrating circumstances, it never for one moment occurred to me that there might be the smallest doubt about the outcome of the vast war the president was asking the Congress to declare. Nor did I find any other American throughout the entire war who ever doubted the eventual outcome. Even more than the feeling that there were giants in the land, I now feel nostalgia for the absolute confidence in the American future, which was the necessary foundation of this total absence of doubt. Hope was in fact Franklin Roosevelt’s greatest gift to his fellow Americans.
Al Gore
He reminds me of something Jack Kennedy once told a British journalist about Richard Nixon: “Nixon is a nice fellow in private, and a very able man. I worked with him on the Hill for a long time, but it seems he has a split personality and he is very bad in public.”
Both are true of Al Gore. In person, he has a good sense of humor, is capable of enjoying the moment. On Air Force Two he could be a warm host. At a Georgetown party, he can be an easy fellow guest. He can also be stone-faced, profoundly aristocratic. He can use his position to intimidate the other person. I’ve seen him in all these personas.
In public, Gore can simply seem robotic. I once watched him address a large international group of Green party politicians in the Capitol. Instead of a warm welcome, he used his after-dinner remarks to read a printed address. It was as if he’d arrived in a Federal Express envelope.
It’s really a problem of multiple public personalities. Again, there’s the Nixon parallel. Jack Kennedy once told an ally that he felt sorry for Nixon because he did not know who he was, and at each stop he had to decide which Nixon he was at the moment, which had to have been very exhausting.
In the three presidential debates of 2000, Vice-President Gore showed the country three different Alberts. First came the overbearing know-it-all. Then came the recessive, passive guy. Finally, there arrived the hybrid, the self Gore promoted in his postdebate spin session as “just right.”
The public, perhaps dizzy from too much time tracking Gore through the funhouse mirror of his campaign, didn’t agree. They knew Goldilocks. They grew up with Goldilocks. Al Gore was no Goldilocks. If he reminded us of any figure from our collective youths it was the movie-star-turned-TV-hostess Loretta Young, known for wearing a new dress for every scene.
Then there’s the Clinton problem. When he knew Clinton was lying publicly about Monica, and he must have known almost immediately, he should have made a simple, indelible statement along the lines that “a president should not lie to the American people.” Clinton wouldn’t have liked it, and the party hacks would have muttered bad things about the importance of “dancing with the one that brung you,” but Al Gore would have stood out at a critical time as a leader with a sense of honor. He would have marked himself, and been marked by the country, as his own man. The country would have known it had at least one national officeholder with a hard and fast commitment to preserving the honor of his high office.
Instead Gore offered himself as a character out of The Last Hurrah, a Ditto Boland repeating “the governah’s” words as if gospel. Looking for a future leader, a replacement to the dishonored Clinton, the voters couldn’t spot one, not until George W. Bush came along offering to respect not just the Constitution but also something Gore could not dare mention for the tragic reason that he had failed to when it mattered: the honor of the office.
Gore spent too much of the 2000 election itself going on the negative. He even manufactured a claim tha
t his dog paid a cheaper price than his mother-in-law for the same arthritis medicine. That set the tone. Having spent his entire life preparing for the presidency, he spent the summer and fall trying to scare people into voting for him. It was not a pretty picture. He had the strongest asset an incumbent can carry into an election: It’s the economy, stupid! But he blew it.
Al Gore should have said, when it mattered most, that it is important that an American president not tell lies to the people. He didn’t. Instead he led the cheers for Clinton on the day the House of Representatives voted the articles of impeachment. How much better it would have been for him and the country had the vice-president made himself plain that day, had he said what he was thinking: Bill Clinton’s indictment by the Congress was Bill Clinton’s fault.
Instead, Gore called Clinton “a man I believe will be regarded in the history books as one of our greatest presidents.” He watched the galloping horse of history ride through the Rose Garden, but could not or would not pull himself up into the saddle.
Even as a Faustian deal it made no sense. Why would Gore, who did not deserve an iota of blame for the Monica Lewinsky affair itself, sell his soul to Clinton in 1998, only to then welsh on the deal two years later? Why would he kneel before the master at the moment when the master’s words were dishonest, his actions contemptible? Why would he then break so unceremoniously from Clinton in 2000? When it came time to share the bragging rights for the strong economy, Gore acted like he’d never met the man.
I repeat: If Gore had made a one-sentence statement in 1998—“A president should not lie to the American people”—I believe he would be president today. Yes, he would have angered Clinton. Clinton would have stayed angry for anywhere from ten days to two weeks. Then, liberated from his sycophancy, Gore could have invited his boss to join him in a 2000 victory lap.
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 153
