Bush would later say he could pass a background check going back to 1974. The date was chosen because his father was inaugurated in 1989, and background checks of appointees went back fifteen years. “I’m not going to talk about what I did years ago,” Bush said. “This is a Washington game where they float rumors, force a person to fight off a rumor, then they’ll float another rumor. And I’m not going to participate. I saw what happened to my dad with rumors. I made mistakes. I’ve asked people not to let the rumors get in the way of the facts. I’ve told people I’ve learned from my mistakes, and I have.”
“I’ve never known him to take drugs, and he’s never talked to me about taking drugs,” his college roommate said. I’ve never been with him when he was taking drugs. He drank in college, and he drank as an adult. I never saw him drink to excess any more than anyone drinks to excess in college.
I was unmarried and single,“ Bush would latter say. ”I deny every a
[As governor in 1995, Bush] understood there was empirical, scientific evidence that could help Texas make better decisions about how we teach kids to read. By then, “science” had become a code word for phonics. But the educational establishment was so fanatically wedded to the whole-language method [so proponents] referred to what the “science” had found about reading.
Bush devised legislation that would tie Texas state funding to use of a reading method whose efficacy had been proven, meaning phonics. To create more accountability, schools that did not improve were penalized.
Under Bush’s proposal, schools would be required to make steady progress toward raising proficiency, with all students required to reach state-defined acceptable levels by 2014. Schools deemed failing for two consecutive years would have to begin to allow students to transfer to better schools. After a third year of failing, they could use public money to hire private firms to tutor students. If a school continued to fail, it had to replace its principal and teachers or reopen as a charter school. Bush wanted vouchers so parents could send their kids to such schools.
Bush would have none of that. If there was anything he hated, it was charades. He forthrightly announced he would not support the treaty and would instead devote funds to study how to reduce global warming through less drastic measures, including building more environmentally friendly vehicles.
“The emperor Kyoto was running around for a long time, and he was naked,” Andy Card said. “It took President Bush to say, ‘The guy doesn’t have any clothes on.’” European nations, in particular, were incensed that Bush rejected the Kyoto treaty. The French environment minister called it a “scandal.” Yet none of those countries had agreed to honor the treaty.
With Bush, Rice said, “The worst thing you can do is tell him you’re going to do something and then not do it.” The next worst thing is to waste his time beating around the bush. “He is very straightforward himself and tends to like straightforward people,” Rice said. “You don’t want to spend a long time constructing a baroque argument for him. I’ve watched him with many foreign leaders. His best relationship with foreign leaders are when he feels like they are being as straightforward with him as he is with them. He can do that past language barriers. He can sense the body language.”
The Bush approach was to use elegantly simple market-based solutions to reduce costs. Under the old Medicare, there was no preventative care. Now when you are a senior and turn sixty-five, you will get a physical. Medicare can identify problems rather than waiting until you are seventy-five and they are more serious. And how could anyone be against giving the elderly prescription drugs that they did not have before?
Bush’s parents had not told him how serious her condition was. They were afraid he might tell her. When they drove to his school to tell him she had died, George, in the second grade, spotted them and thought he saw Robin. “I got to the car still thinking Robin was there,” Bush said later, “but of course, she was not.”
Barbara Bush said in her memoirs, “He asked a lot of questions and couldn’t understand why we had known for a long time.“ George felt an obligation to comfort his mother, who leaned on her son for support while her husband traveled. He would joke and laugh and make her feel better. The loss gave him a sense of how fleeting and arbitrary life can be, contributing to his lighthearted approach. Bush was bothered by the fact that, outside their family, no one mentioned Robin and her death. As he would later in life, Bush liked to confront issues.
Bush became a cheerleader at the all-boys school. He would wield a megaphone at football games and make barbed remarks about spectators and players. The show that he and his cohorts put on overshadowed the game, causing some grumbling. But the school paper came to his defense. ”George’s gang has done a commendable job, and now is not the time to throw a wet blanket over cheerleading,“ an editorial said. ”School spirit had never been higher,“ Johnson said.
On paper, Richard Nixon was one of the smartest presidents, with an IQ of 143, yet he orchestrated the Watergate cover-up, leading to his resignation. Bush had little interest in learning for its own sake. He was goal oriented and prized actions over words. Only if learning helped him to make a decision was he interested. What he wanted, he would say in rare reflective moments, was to “get as much out of life as possible and to do as much as possible.” When he retires someday to his ranch, he has said, “I want to turn to my wife and say, My dance card was full. I lived life to the fullest.”
In Skull & Bones’ house were faded portraits of venerable Bonesmen-Rockefellers, Harrimans, Tafts, Whitneys, and Bushes-posing with skull and crossbones. Members called themselves “good men,” a term Bush would use to describe people he trusted and admired.
Bush drank at fraternity parties and engaged in pranks. “George was a fraternity guy, but he wasn’t Belushi in Animal House,” recalled Calvin Hill, a DKE with Bush. He was a goodtime guy. But he wasn’t the guy hugging the commode at the end of the day.
“I think he was far less wild than the media portrays it,” his Skull and Bones friend Donald Etra said. “He drank but not to excess. I never saw any drugs.”
The entire performance was a manifestation of Bush’s intense distaste for acting and pretense. When responding to loaded questions from reporters or an unfair charge by Gore, Bush’s honesty impelled him to signal, if ever so subtly, what he really thought. The smirk was not a signal of arrogance but rather an effort to convey his true feelings: that he was participating in a charade. When emerging from sessions with political types, he would roll his eyes and grouse under his breath about the “B.S.” meeting he had just had. In debates with Gore, he could not very well say, “That’s B.S.,” so he would smirk.
“He’s a bad actor, a bad pretender,” an aide said. “What you see is what you get.. A real actor would not show that.”
“When I left here, I didn’t have much in the way of a life plan,” Bush told students when he returned to Yale in 2001. “I knew some people who thought they did. But it turned out that we were all in it for the ups and downs, most of them unexpected. Life takes its turns, makes it own demands, writes its own story. And along the way, we start to realize we are not the author.“
No one could have anticipated the peril that America would face during the presidency of George W. Bush. Yet no one could have been better suited to confronting that peril. It required vision, courage, patience, optimism, integrity, focus, discipline, determination, decisiveness, and devotion to America.
As president, Bush would look back at Vietnam as an example of how not wage war. If a war was worth fighting, it had to be to win, Bush would say. He called Vietnam a “politicians’ war,” one where the politicians made military decisions.
But at Yale, he was acutely aware that anything he did or said could harm his father’s political career. “George didn’t have that luxury [of engaging in protest],” Laura Bush would later say. “He really didn’t. He was absolutely devoted to his father.”
By using the broader term “harbor,” Bush had not only expanded the definition of the enemy, he shifted the burden of proof of the United States would use in going after those who support terrorism. Instead of having to show that another country was aware of and permitted terrorists to operate within its borders, the US would now use military force or apply diplomatic pressure on countries simply because terrorists lived there. The declaration became known as the Bush Doctrine. It was a sea change in foreign policy, one that would make all the difference in the war on terror.
“Presidents used to mumble when it got to a question of a Palestinian state,” Rice told me in her office one Saturday morning. “They couldn’t bring themselves to say ‘Palestinian State.’ In preparing a speech to the UN, he said, ‘There’s going to be a Palestinian state, so let’s say that. What will it be called? It will be called Palestine. If that’s the case, let’s call it Palestine.’“
On November 10, 2001, Bush told the UN, ”We are working toward a day when two states, Israel and Palestine, live peacefully together within secure and recognized borders as called for by the Security Council resolutions.“
In fact, M16, the British intelligence service, still believed that its intelligence about Niger was correct. Contrary to the news reports, its information did not rely on bogus documents. Nor did Powell mention Niger eight days after the State of the Union in his formal presentation to the United Nations. Few news stories mentioned these points.
Tenet stepped up to the plate and said he took overall responsibility for the fact that, when reviewing drafts of the president’s speech, his agency did not object more vigorously to citing the Niger report. [Tenet resigned in July 2004]
The “impressions” were, in fact, mis-impressions. To be sure, a majority of Americans thought that Bush had said Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11 attacks. But they confused Bush’s simple point that, after 9/11, America must never again be in the position of passively waiting for an attack by a country like Iraq.
“After September 11, the doctrine of containment just doesn’t hold any water, as far as I’m concerned,” Bush said with typical bluntness. “We must deal with threats before they hurt the American people again.”
In his interim report, David Kay, the leader of the US hunt for Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, concluded that his team “discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities. concealed from the UN.”
It was not a catchy phrase, and conservatives didn’t like it because it implied that there was something wrong with being a conservative -like calling someone a realistic liberal. But the phrase accurately described Bush’s philosophy. His goal was to help people. He believed the best way to do that was to develop government programs and policies that allowed them to help themselves. He did not see the government as the enemy, as the traditional conservatives did. Often, adjusting existing programs could achieve results while saving taxpayers money. Reducing taxes, in turn, was yet another way to help people.
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The above quotations are from A Matter of Character: Inside the White House of George W. Bush, by Ronald Kessler.
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