George Bush: The new statesman?

by Mary Dejevsky

15 September 2001

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Osama bin Laden: The godfather of terror?

It was lunchtime on Thursday, and George W Bush stood behind his Oval Office desk, the desk used before him by Presidents Clinton and Kennedy. He shifted his weight uneasily, or in excitement, from one foot to the other, while speaking on the phone to the Governor and Mayor of New York. When he put down the receiver, looking grim but determined, he addressed assembled reporters, speaking in self-consciously high-flown terms about "winning the first war of the 21st century".

Thus far, it was an old-fashioned scene, with an old-fashioned phone, staged for the cameras as a demonstration of solidarity with New York, and of presidential authority. The President, this miniature production said, was at his post and at one with the American people.

But then, asked about his personal response to what was by now known to be the most devastating terrorist attack on any country, ever, the theatre suddenly lapsed. The President turned away for a second, then turned back, with tears visibly welling in his eyes, and went on: "Well, I don't think of myself right now. I think about the families, the children. I'm a loving guy. And I am also someone, however, who's got a job to do and I intend to do it... This country will not relent until we have saved ourselves, and others, from the terrible tragedy that came upon America."

For almost the first time in his nine months in the White House, Americans caught a glimpse of their notably unflappable and scripted President giving way to genuine and spontaneous emotion. What will become apparent only with hindsight is whether that moment was a mark of strength or of weakness, as the next days and weeks show whether the second President Bush is really up to the job.

When George W Bush swore the oath of office on 20 January, he was one of the least experienced chief executives the United States had ever elected. The aftermath of last week's catastrophic terrorist onslaught, however, is fast making him one of the most experienced, in intensity, if not in breadth. In four days and nights this week, President Bush has been exposed to some of the most acute dangers and most intense emotions that any recent president has had to confront.

He was peacefully reading to primary school children in Florida when he learned that first one, and then the second of New York's World Trade Centre towers had been hit by two hijacked American planes. He was in Air Force One flying home to Washington when he learned that the Pentagon, the nerve-centre of the country's defences, had been hit by a third errant plane, and apparently in a holding pattern over northern Florida when word came that a fourth US passenger plane had crashed – en route, it was believed – for Camp David, the White House, or even his own plane.

He spent the rest of the day flitting across the country of which he was leader – dispatched under fighter-plane escort – to an air force base in Louisiana, to a fortified bunker in Nebraska, and finally back to Washington in time to make an evening broadcast to a shocked and, until that hour, seemingly leaderless nation. He spoke – at times hesitantly – about hunting down the culprits, about vanquishing terrorism, and about evil.

The ensuing days were spent in a feverish race to recover the commanding heights of his office. His advisers have spun tales of how he repeatedly contested the advice of the Secret Service and his Vice-President to seek refuge in the nuclear bunker in Nebraska. His father, the previous President Bush, was wheeled out to express irritation with those who criticised his son for not returning immediately to Washington and to say, somewhat feebly: "I know he is strong."

In that time, the world has seen the worst and the best of George W Bush. At worst, he has been inarticulate and inconsequential. He has looked small, diffident and uncertain. At best, he has been unflinching, single-minded and so patently sincere and distressed that it was wrenching to watch.

The temptation is to say that there is nothing in George Bush's life or career that has prepared him for the testing time he now faces. But then no US president, with the possible exception of Franklin D Roosevelt after the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor, has faced anything even remotely equivalent. Several thousand, perhaps many thousand, Americans are dead: they include several hundred passengers in civilian aircraft who were able to phone their last desperate messages home. They include a hundred or more defence department staff, 400 New York rescue workers and thousands who simply set off for lower Manhattan one morning, never to return. Buildings symbolic of American success have been destroyed or critically damaged, deliberately, with extreme violence and with malice aforethought. America has reacted with angry defiance and an outpouring of militant patriotism; it is baying for blood.

To exercise leadership, while reflecting and tempering public sentiment, would be a great deal to ask of any president, especially one whose life hitherto has been one of such ease. The eldest son of the prosperous and well-connected George H W Bush, George W has led a gilded existence. His family was not only wealthy, but solid and respected. He attended the best schools and colleges that money and privilege could provide. He went from the select Andover College in New England, to Yale, obtaining an adequate, if undistinguished degree in history, before – unlike many of his less fortunate contemporaries – successfully avoiding military service in Vietnam, without joining the protest movement or breaking the law.

Assured through family contacts of acceptance, he volunteered for the Texas Air National Guard, a safe option that allowed him to live the life of a part-time playboy – drinking to excess, and perhaps experimenting with drugs – while also training to fly. He was, by all accounts, a competent, if at times over-intrepid pilot, traits that live on in the way he now drives his Jeeps around the grounds of his Texas ranch.

In the fullness of time, George W knuckled down to take a business degree at Harvard, one of the qualifications most prized by American business. But instead of using his master's degree as a leg-up to a large salary at a multi-national, he set up on his own in the oil business in western Texas, a state, and a region, that he has adopted as his own. Texas appealed to him, he has said, because of its wildness and scale and because of the quintessentially American sense of opportunity that he found in the oil prospectors' town of Midland.

From then on, he mingled business and politics, neither with marked success. He was bailed out of near-failure in his oil-drilling business by a combination of family contacts and personal charm. Always a bit of a salesman, he seemed to have no trouble drawing richer and more qualified people to his side and using them to their mutual advantage.

 

It was in his post-MBA Midland years that he was introduced to Laura Welch, a Midland native and now school librarian, who, like him, had passed the age of 30 and still remained single. Within six months they had married: a decision he regularly recounts as the best of his life. Laura, as he and some of their mutual friends present it, performed the classic role of redemptive woman. Capable and calm, she settled him down, smoothed some rough corners, and campaigned loyally by his side as he made his first – unsuccessful – sortie into politics.

Laura is also credited with laying down the ultimatum that led to George W to decide on the day after his 40th birthday to give up drinking, the last vestige of his mis-spent youth. He later admitted (when the presidential campaign was safely over) that his over-indulgence had threatened to become more central to his life than his family. It had also brought him trouble with the law on at least one occasion, bringing him a drink-driving ticket that came to light 20 years later, perilously close to presidential election day.

But George W did not just give up drinking. Thanks to the evangelist, Billy Graham, he says, he also turned in a big way to God. He counts himself as a born-again Christian in the Southern, fundamentalist mode, opposes abortion, reads the Bible every day and starts meals with grace. He also has a firm sense of personal morality that caused him, as Governor of Texas, to have a young woman staff member who flirted with him removed from his office on the grounds that his marriage was for life and adultery was against the Ten Commandments.

While President Bush would hardly claim to have been tested in anything like the same crucible of life as his predecessor, Bill Clinton, his fellow Texan, Lyndon B Johnson or FDR, there are also features and chapters of his life that suggest he may not be so ill-equipped to deal with this epic American crisis after all.

To be sure, he is nothing like as contagiously emotional or empathetic as Bill Clinton, but he has known personal loss. He vividly recalls still the day that his parents returned home one day without his three-year old sister, Robin, who had died of leukaemia in hospital.

Mr Bush may have scraped through his first degree at Yale, but a Harvard MBA is a more difficult project to "wing". Whatever people say about his wily, and highly political charm, or the luck and connections that made him part-owner and full-time manager of the Texas Rangers baseball team in 1989 – and also made his personal fortune – few question his managerial competence. He is the first trained manager to attain the presidency of the United States, a position sometimes described as the world's chief executive officer – and that may be no bad thing to be at a time of such crisis.

In naming and structuring his administration, President Bush applied managerial principles of line management and personal accountability, as indeed he did as Governor of Texas. He delegates without qualms – some say he delegates too much. While delegating, however, he demands utter loyalty, both personal and professional, a requirement that may again stand him in good stead in the trials to come. He also trusts proven ability. He had no difficulty in attracting to his administration a team of professionals who had no need to serve in government to prove their worth and who – in several cases – suffered severe material loss by joining or returning to public service.

There have been times, when such individuals – the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, the Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, to name but two – have seemed liabilities because of their lack of political finesse. With the Twin Towers in rubble, lower Manhattan a virtual war zone, and the Pentagon in flames, these may be exactly the sort of people Mr Bush needs around him. Mr Rumsfeld might have alienated large numbers of the top brass with his outspoken plans for military reform, but last Tuesday, he refused evacuation, remained at his Pentagon desk throughout the day and even helped with the rescue effort. Such gritty subordinates are just what a president needs if, as appears, he is contemplating going to war.

Nor may Mr Bush himself be quite as diffident and short on that indefinable quality known as character as his inarticulacy and timid body language often suggest. He ran for office – both for Congress (when he lost) and for Governor of Texas (when he won) against all the odds. As his presidential campaign also testified, he is not afraid of competing, and he does not wilt under pressure. He has a streak of the gambler, but not to the point of unreason. He fought fiercely for the White House once it was within his grasp, his doughty, ruthless, seconds bearing the brunt of the battle.

Mr Bush is also strong-minded. When he decided to marry, he remained faithful. When he decided to quit the bottle, that is what he did – just like that. He prides himself on being able to take tough decisions. So far, that quality has not been much in evidence; in practice – as with his compromise on stemm-cell research – he has preferred diplomatic wordplay to dividing American (or congressional) opinion. But with the country united behind him, and one enemy – the as yet unidentified terrorists – in his sights, the "tough" decision on retaliation may not in fact be so tough. The tricky part could come later if a military operation somehow went wrong.

Through his family background and his religion, President Bush has also developed a strong sense of what is appropriate to the presidency. His campaign pledge to "restore honour and dignity to the White House" was in part a political swipe against the outgoing Bill Clinton. But it was also a clear statement about the duties of the President, as he saw the office embodied by his father. These would undoubtedly include the belief that the office of president is greater than any one individual, that the good of the nation supersedes the interests of the individual, and that the United States, as a fount of democracy and freedom, has a duty of leadership to the rest of the world.

Such sentiments may sound unsophisticated and trite, even questionable, in many places outside America. But they are an integral part of many Americans' view of their president, and while there is no evidence at all that Bill Clinton did not subscribe to these American values, they were especially associated with the first President Bush.

The son of that decent, but ultimately failed, president is now at a historic moment in his presidency. It is one of those times when the judgement and character of one individual can determine not only his fate, but that of his nation, even that of the world.

Before last Tuesday, Mr Bush appeared to be floundering. The first year of his presidency looked set to be marked by the same sort of economic decline and political drift that had doomed the presidency of his father. He appeared too keen to forge consensus at the expense of clear principle. He had given to the rich without consoling the poor. He was felt to have betrayed his promise to govern from the centre, and his tax cuts were on the verge of exhausting the Clinton term's record surplus. Through heavy-handed diplomacy and ignorance of the world, he had alienated the international coalition so painstakingly put together by his father to fight the Gulf war and sustained by Bill Clinton.

Tuesday's cataclysm gives George W Bush's presidency a new start, in a new world. The line between friends and enemies is suddenly clear; the gulf between home and abroad has closed. In one of several televised speeches this week, he told Americans with rare directness and conviction: "Our battle will take time and resolve, and make no mistake, we will prevail."

One of the earliest and most enduring themes of Mr Bush's presidential campaign was his claim to be a leader. That claim derived from his five years and re-election as Governor of Texas, from his five years as manager of the Texas Rangers, and last, but not least, from an inherited sense of his destiny. He now has the chance of a lifetime to prove that claim.

Life Story

Born: George Walker Bush, 6 July 1946, in New Haven, Connecticut. Brought up in Midland and Houston, Texas.

Family: Father, George Herbert Walker Bush, former president of the US; mother, Barbara Bush (née Pierce). Three brothers, including Jeb (governor of Florida), and one sister.

Married: Laura Welch Bush, a former librarian in 1977. Twin girls, Barbara and Jenna, b 1981.

Education: Andover School, 1964; Yale University, BA 1968; Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School, 1975.

Military career: F-102 fighter pilot, Texas Air National Guard, 1968-73.

Business career: Oil and gas business in Midland, Texas, 1975; energy industry, late 1980s; purchased with partners the Texas Rangers baseball team, 1989; managing general partner of the Rangers, 1989-94.

Political career: Unsuccessful candidate for Congress, 1978; Senior adviser to George Bush for president campaign, 1988; Governor of Texas, Jan 1985-2000; 43rd President of the United States after defeating Democrat candidate Al Gore.

Personal Life: Religious awakening at the time of his 40th birthday in 1986.

Publications: A Charge to Keep (written with Karen Hughes) ­ a political autobiography.

He says: "Make no mistake about it, my resolve is steady and strong about winning this war that has been declared on America."

They say: "The fact is, he's never had to really work or fight for anything in his whole life." Molly Ivins, Bush's biographer.


© 2001 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd