Privately, the former President could not hide his delight over the historical connection between the Bushes and the Adamses. When the younger Bush became President, the elder Bush teasingly called him “Quincy.” But only within the family. George W. Bush acknowledged his unique position when he hung an imposing portrait of John Quincy Adams in the small dining room off the Oval Office. He later signed a bill to authorize building a memorial on federal land in Washington, D.C., to honor John Adams and his family, which by extension would honor George Bush and his family.
In the summer of 2001 the former President played golf with his son. Both wore baseball caps—one marked “41,” the other “43.” The following year on the golf course, “43” appeared in a cap that said “El Jefe.” By then the dynamic between father and son had changed, and their conflicted relationship was being played out on the international stage with consequences that reached far beyond their own world.
Supporters of the former President felt reassured in 2001 as they saw the inexperienced new President surround himself with veterans of his father’s administration. The elder Bush had driven his son’s decision to choose Richard B. Cheney as Vice President; Cheney had served Bush 41 as Secretary of Defense. The former President also pushed for Colin Powell to be his son’s Secretary of Defense. Powell had served the former President as National Security Adviser and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But the presidency of Bush 43 was not to be a reprise of Bush 41.
The new President assumed office determined not to repeat his father’s mistakes. Unlike the former President, George W. said his first priority was to protect his political base. And that’s exactly what he did. Despite his campaign oratory, his core supporters were not “compassionate conservatives.” George W. knew that it was the radicalized right who looked upon him as a warrior. So within forty-eight hours of his inaugural, he issued an executive order banning U.S. government aid to international family-planning groups that perform abortions or provide abortion counseling. He also signed a bill requiring that a fetus that showed signs of life following an abortion procedure be considered a person under federal law. He later signed a law prohibiting partial-birth abortion. The measure, which had been vetoed twice by Clinton, was the most significant restriction on abortion rights in years. Federal judges in Nebraska, San Francisco, and New York ruled that the law was unconstitutional, but the President did not care. He had accommodated his evangelical base. His Attorney General, John Ashcroft, another evangelical, announced that to defend the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, the Justice Department would subpoena patients’ records when doctors sued and argued that the law interfered with necessary life-saving procedures.
By defining a fetus as a person, the President had forced himself into taking a hard line against providing federal funds for embryonic-stem-cell research. His decision will hamper scientific research for decades. Embryonic cells, which give rise to all types of specialized cells in the human body, are said by scientists to hold great promise for the potential treatment of diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and juvenile diabetes. But people who oppose abortion abhor the research because the embryo is destroyed in the process of extracting the stem cells.
Former First Lady Nancy Reagan, tending her husband, who was dying of Alzheimer’s, urged the President to back stem-cell studies. Instead, he restricted federal funding to only sixty stem-cell lines already in existence. He felt his compromised decision was the perfect political—if not moral—solution. He had satisfied his anti-abortion supporters while giving something to those in his own party who wanted the federal government to advance rather than hinder research into debilitating diseases.
He had alienated Nancy Reagan forever. Ron Reagan Jr. said his mother felt estranged from the Republican Party over the President’s opposition to embryonic-stem-cell research. “She distrusts some of these [Bush] people. She gets that they’re trouble in all kinds of ways. She doesn’t like their religious fervor, their aggression,” he said. “Now, ignorance is one thing, ignorance can be cured. But many of the Republican leaders opposing this research know better, people like [Senate Majority Leader] Bill Frist, who’s a doctor, for God’s sake. People like him are blocking it to pander to the 20 percent of their base who are mouth-breathers. And that’s unconscionable—there are lives at stake here. Stem-cell research can revolutionize medicine more than anything since antibiotics.”
The new President was not afraid of controversy. Three days into office, he stepped over the constitutional line separating church and state by announcing his intention to make federal funds available to faith-based groups that provided social services. He said, “A compassionate society is one that recognizes the great power of faith.” Over $1.1 billion was disbursed by the Bush administration to Christian groups. No Jews or Muslims received funds. The President put no accounting procedures into his faith-based grants, which meant there were no guidelines or restrictions on how the money was to be spent. As a result, the funds rarely reached those who most needed help. Over time W.’s “faith-based initiative” came to look exactly like what it was: a political payoff to church groups to keep them voting Republican.
Bush 43 used the presidency of Bush 41 as a template for what
not
to do. His father had paid no attention to his reelection campaign until it was too late. George W. started running for reelection at the time he took office, and by 2004 he had raised over $200 million to run against Senator John Kerry. Having determined that his father’s worst mistake was to raise taxes after promising not to, George W. decided to cut taxes. In the first year he initiated a series of cuts worth $1.35 trillion. When critics closely examined the plan and pointed out that only the wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers would divvy up 28 percent of the windfall while the poorest 60 percent would split only 8 percent of the benefits, Bush accused them of engaging in “class warfare.” The Princeton economist Paul Krugman wrote in
The New York Times
that the nation could not possibly afford these tax cuts if the Bush administration was to keep its promises in such areas as education, health care, and military defense. The
Financial Times
looked at the Bush tax bill and declared, “The lunatics are now in charge of the asylum.”
As a presidential candidate, Governor Bush had initiated what he called a “charm offensive” toward the press; as President, he was charmless and defensive. He refused to read newspapers, other than box scores and headlines. “I’m more interested in news [than opinions],” he told Brit Hume of Fox News, “and the best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.”
Even as President, George W. evinced a lifelong pattern: he was not someone who wished to educate himself about life’s issues. He wanted only to have his uninformed opinions and beliefs supported and confirmed. This lack of intellectual curiosity combined with dynastic arrogance was to have life-and-death consequences later in his presidency.
Historians especially were appalled by the President’s lack of knowledge and his resistance to learning. At a symposium in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 2002, Robert Dallek was seen in conversation with David Herbert Donald. “George W. is the worst President since Warren G. Harding,” said Dallek.
The eminent Pulitzer Prize–winning historian shook his head. “Oh, no, Bob,” said Donald. “He’s the worst since Franklin Pierce.”
Neither historian connected the alcoholic, one-term Pierce, fourteenth President of the United States, to George W. Bush, whose mother, Barbara Pierce Bush, was a fourth cousin four times removed.
The President decided early on that press conferences were a waste of his time. He said they served only to let reporters “peacock” (his term for upstaging him on national television) and “play gotcha.” During four years, he held only 12 solo press conferences. In the same period of time, his father held 141. As President, George Herbert Walker Bush had cared too much about courting the press; his son did not care at all. W. had never liked reporters. Dealing with the press as his father’s enforcer, he frequently responded to their questions by saying, “No comment, asshole.”
As President, when he does meet with reporters, he is carefully scripted. White House correspondents are asked to submit their questions in advance; the press secretary selects a few, and only those reporters are called on during the press conference. As he plunged the country into war with Iraq, the President demanded that his administration speak with one voice—his. He warned that anyone leaking would be fired. The press was given little access to the White House or the Pentagon. Still, the President was not pleased with the coverage his war received. He complained that it was too negative. “We’re making good progress in Iraq,” he said in October 2003. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell it when you listen to the filter.” The “filter” was the national news media, which the President ignored in favor of giving interviews to regional broadcasters. That year he gave no one-on-one interview to any major U.S. newspaper. Instead, he spoke only to
The Sun
, the biggest-selling newspaper in Britain. Roxanne Roberts of
The Washington Post
summed up the Bush administration’s attitude toward the press: “They regard us as mosquitoes at a nudist convention. Respect? You must be joking.”
The President prohibited any press coverage of the flag-draped coffins being flown back from Iraq, lest people be reminded of the terrible cost of his war. His attitude, reflecting his family’s dynastic arrogance, was: “Trust me. I know what’s right.”
Bush 41 had been so excited when he finally became President in 1989 that for weeks after his inauguration, he greeted tourists at the White House gates. Housekeepers in the family residence fondly recall his bounding around like a friendly Labrador and inviting friends to watch movies, swim, bowl, and play tennis, after which he led them all on personal tours. In contrast, his less gregarious son was like a corgi, a nasty little nipper with a menacing bark. The father, who loved socializing, held twenty-nine state dinners. The son, who insisted on going to bed at 9:30 p.m., has held only four state dinners.
The differences between father and son as President are as marked as the differences between their wives. Barbara Bush was an activist First Lady who enjoyed the limelight as much as her husband. She sought a high profile through her activities on behalf of literacy and courted press coverage for herself by inviting select reporters to private luncheons in the White House family quarters. She also wrote a book in her dog’s name, which she promoted widely on television.
More reserved than her formidable mother-in-law, Laura Bush has preferred a lower profile, especially in the wake of her controversial predecessor, Hillary Rodham Clinton. From 2001 to 2004, Laura lent her name to many good causes but gave the country very little sense of who she was, other than a former school librarian who liked to read. Her friends hinted that her political views were “much more liberal” than her husband’s, especially on abortion—she was pro-choice—so she avoided speaking out on issues and remained on the periphery of his presidency rather than in its hot center.
The differences between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law became pronounced when both first ladies were asked to deliver commencement addresses. Students protested in each instance. At Wellesley, they said Barbara Bush was nothing more than “the college dropout wife” of the President; at UCLA, they objected to Laura Bush’s “shallow credentials,” saying she had “no merit [beyond] her political celebrity.” Unfazed, Barbara bulldozed her way to Wellesley in 1990 and delivered her speech. Laura responded to the protesters in 2002 by declining the invitation from UCLA.
“Laura is a very nice woman who’s got a lot of problems and smokes constantly,” said a Washington, D.C., interior designer who knows her well. “She spends a great deal of time shopping.”
“Everyone likes Laura,” said a family friend who knew W. before he was married, “and everyone feels she’s good influence on him, but if you’re asking, ‘Is their marriage a great love affair or some grand passion or whatever it was with the Reagans and the Carters and the Fords,’ I’d have to say no, but it’s a marriage that works, only because she does all the work . . . He can be quite impossible.”
Illustrating what was meant by “impossible,” the family friend related W.’s description of meeting Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia. “George said, ‘I told Putin that in this country we own our own homes and because we own them we take great pride in them.’ Then he told me, ‘I don’t think the son of a bitch knew what the hell I was talking about.’
“I was speechless,” said the friend. “George acted like Putin was the dumb hayseed know-nothing and he, George, was the man of the world. I guess it never occurred to him that Putin, former head of the KGB, had been briefed to the gills on American capitalism . . . It was scary listening to the President of the United States sound so damn stupid and arrogant. I was dumbfounded that George had lectured the President of Russia like a first grader on the basics of home ownership in America . . . I’ve known George for many, many years, and I’ve watched him grow more arrogant . . .
“He has no humility whatsoever about being President. He really thinks he deserves the office, that it’s his by merit, not default. There’s no sense that he’s lucky to be there and that if not for a partisan vote by the Supreme Court, he’d still be pumping iron in the governor’s mansion in Austin . . . With each job he’s gotten worse, more arrogant. Now he’s unbearable. But Laura is terrific. Very down-to-earth.”
Linden von Eichel, a Canadian who lives in Washington, D.C., met the First Lady at a black-tie dinner at the Library of Congress shortly after Laura returned from Paris, where she had attended ceremonies marking the U.S. return to UNESCO. Traveling without the President, the First Lady had made front-page news when France’s President Jacques Chirac kissed her hand.