A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency (15 page)

By contrast, policies that are determined on the basis of faith and/or a moral calculus (“God wants every human being to live in freedom, and America is called to the mission of spreading democracy”) cannot be challenged because they stem from evangelical faith. As a result, faith-based decision-makers will accept input only from those who share the faith, and will ignore and even expel those who challenge or contest it. That can have the effect of reinforcing and, worse, creating perceptions of reality that are pleasing but fictitious. As Reagan and Bush 41 official Bruce Bartlett told journalist Ron Suskind in 2004,

“This is why [Bush] dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,” Bartlett went on to say. “He truly believes he’s on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.” Bartlett paused, then said, “But you can’t run the world on faith.”

The demand for loyalty is itself a by-product of his faith-based certainty. Certitude that one is right will naturally reduce, if not eliminate, a tolerance for those who question what has been accorded the status of unquestionable Truth.

Bush’s moral conviction—his intractable certainty in his religious faith—even dictates the rules of behavior imposed on his staff. In his influential October 2004 article in the
New York Times Magazine
, Suskind examined the ways in which the Bush personality drives his presidency, and concluded:

That a deep Christian faith illuminated the personal journey of George W. Bush is common knowledge. But faith has also shaped his presidency in profound, nonreligious ways. The president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision—often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position—he expects complete faith in its rightness.

The faith-based presidency is a with-us-or-against-us model that has been enormously effective at, among other things, keeping the workings and temperament of the Bush White House a kind of state secret.

The president’s contempt for dissent is notorious. That he unleashes his temper at underlings is legendary and has generated a well-documented climate of fear in which his aides are highly reluctant to convey unpleasant news. David Frum described Bush in
The Right Man
as “impatient” and “quick to anger.” In a November 2005
Newsweek
article, Evan Thomas reported on the breakdown of the communication lines to the president concerning Hurricane Katrina:

It’s a standing joke among the president’s top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of the president of the United States, or, as he is known in West Wing jargon, POTUS.

Thomas attributed the failure of the government’s response to Katrina in large part to the atmosphere the president created, in which aides are meek and fearful of delivering bad news:

Bush can be petulant about dissent; he equates disagreement with disloyalty. After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him. Bush can ask tough questions, but it’s mostly a one-way street. Most presidents keep a devil’s advocate around. Lyndon Johnson had George Ball on Vietnam; President Ronald Reagan and Bush’s father, George H. W. Bush, grudgingly listened to the arguments of Budget Director Richard Darman, who told them what they didn’t wish to hear: that they would have to raise taxes.

When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job and that the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn’t act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority.

Thomas’s reference to the role played by the dissenting, highly intelligent Richard Darman in the Bush 41 administration is telling. According to David Frum, the president purposely staffs the White House with capable but less-than-brilliant individuals, precisely because he seeks those who will loyally carry out instructions rather than those who will prod, question, and deviate from his predetermined policies. In short, Bush affirmatively sought to prohibit Darman-like dissent:

If you looked around the Bush cabinet, you saw very able, solid, and reliable people—but only one, Donald Rumsfeld, whose mind could truly be said to sparkle. If you looked at the White House staff, there was again a dearth of really high-powered brains. One seldom heard an unexpected thought or met someone who possessed unusual knowledge. Aside from Mitch Daniels in OMB of course Karl Rove,
conspicuous intelligence seemed actively unwelcome in the Bush White House
[emphasis added].

Clinton had brought in eccentrics, some of them, perhaps, but also powerful intelligences, open to new ideas. The country could trust the Bush administration not to cheat or lie. But could the administration cope with an unprecedented problem? That might be rather dicier.

The reason for the bias toward the ordinary was Richard Darman, the most conspicuously brilliant person in Bush 41’s White House. In the 1992 election, he attacked Bush 41 himself. And the lesson the younger Bush took from that experience was: no new Darmans.

As Christine Whitman told Suskind of her (predictably short-lived) tenure as Environmental Protection Agency administrator: “In meetings, I’d ask if there were any facts to support our case. And for that, I was accused of disloyalty!”

Demands of rigid loyalty, along with a “kill the messenger” attitude toward bearers of news that undermines beliefs, are particularly dangerous for a president such as George Bush, who, by his own reckoning, depends so heavily on aides—not only for advice and counsel but also for basic information about what is going on in the world. In a September 23, 2003, interview with Fox News’ Brit Hume, the president boasted of the fact that he does not read newspapers, but instead forms his understanding of the world based upon what his closest aides tell him:

HUME:
How do you get your news?]

BUSH:
I get briefed by Andy Card and Condi in the morning. They come in and tell me. In all due respect, you’ve got a beautiful face and everything [
sic
].
I glance at the headlines just to kind of get a flavor for what’s moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are [
sic
] probably read the news themselves. But like Condoleezza, in her case, the national security adviser is getting her news directly from the participants on the world stage.

HUME:
Has that been your practice since day one, or is that a practice that you’ve…

BUSH:
Practice since day one.

HUME:
Really?

BUSH:
Yes. You know, look, I have great respect for the media. I mean, our society is a good, solid democracy because of a good, solid media. But I also understand that a lot of times there’s opinions mixed in with news. And I…

HUME:
I won’t disagree with that, sir.

BUSH:
I appreciate people’s opinions, but I’m more interested in 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.

Over time, the president’s staff has become increasingly monolithic and loyal to the president’s worldview and core convictions, and correspondingly less burdened by dissent. Thus, the great paradox of the Bush presidency is that as his presidency and his war in Iraq have collapsed around him, the world he occupies has been designed to affirm unceasingly that he is on the side of Good and is thus entitled—even obligated—to remain on the path of righteousness even as opposition to that course grows and evidence of its failure expands.

DESIRES FULFILLED

T
hat the president is accustomed to an environment that caters to his beliefs and desires is to be expected, in light of his upbringing as the eldest son in a powerful and wealthy political family. While the president was growing up, his father was a congressman, U.N. ambassador, Senate nominee, Republican National Committee chair, and CIA director, and he was thus accustomed to having others create opportunities for him and grant his wishes, thereby being able to do what he wanted without much resistance from others. Perhaps most significantly, the power and prestige of his father enabled him to be saved from mistakes and disasters—including a series of failed business ventures—that created the expectation that no serious damage would ever result, even from reckless errors. Being repeatedly rescued—and continuing to thrive even in the face of repeated failures—can ultimately engender a sense of infallibility, or at the very least an implicit belief that one need not really fear, or even consider, the consequences of one’s actions.

In the 1970s, one of the closest friends of the Bush family was Jimmy Allison, a Texas campaign consultant highly trusted by George H. W. Bush. Allison’s widow, Linda, who had spent substantial time in the company of the Bush family, sat for several days of interviews with journalist Mary Jacoby. Jacoby then published a 2004 article based on those interviews in
Salon,
in which Linda Allison recounts incidents that capture the younger Bush’s sense of entitlement, as well as his petulance and rage when told “no”:

The break [between Bush and his father] happened not long after a boozy election-night wake for Blount, who lost his Senate bid to the incumbent Democrat, John Sparkman. Leaving the election-night “celebration,” Allison remembers encountering George W. Bush in the parking lot, urinating on a car, and hearing later about how he’d yelled obscenities at police officers that night. Bush left a house he’d rented in Montgomery trashed—the furniture broken, walls damaged and a chandelier destroyed, the
Birmingham News
reported in February.

“He was just a rich kid who had no respect for other people’s possessions,” Mary Smith, a member of the family who rented the house, told the newspaper, adding that a bill sent to Bush for repairs was never paid.

And a month later, in December, during a visit to his parents’ home in Washington, Bush drunkenly challenged his father to go “mano a mano,” as has often been reported.

To his credit, Bush has candidly acknowledged the disregard for responsibilities and the welfare of others that drove his life until he found God in 1985, at the age of almost forty. In one sense, the authenticity of Bush’s evangelical conversion seems beyond doubt, given the profound life changes it facilitated, most particularly the abrupt and total cessation of what was, by all accounts (including his own), a rather severe addiction to alcohol. But in another, equally significant sense, replacing an alcohol-fueled life of unbridled hedonism with a fervent evangelical certainty can be seen as a lateral, rather than a vertical, move. Both before and after the conversion, Bush evinced a strong sense of certainty, superiority, and elite piety. Pre-and postconversion, Bush’s place in the world was clear, right, secure, unquestioned, and unquestionable. And in both phases, there was little space or tolerance for those who opposed or contradicted him.

Even now, the president’s own statements frequently reveal this insatiable sense of inborn entitlement—an expectation that his will can and should be transformed into reality without opposition or obstruction. In a December 2001 press conference, the president admonished American citizens as follows:

The American people must understand when I said that we need to be patient,
that I meant it.
And we’re going to be there for a while. I don’t know the exact moment when we leave, David, but it’s not until the mission is complete. The world must know that this administration will not blink in the face of danger and will not tire when it comes to completing the missions that we said we would do. The world will learn that when the United States is harmed, we will follow through. The world will see that when we put a coalition together that says “Join us,” I mean it. And
when I ask others to participate, I mean it
[emphasis added].

There is a parental, even bullying, tone that pervades the president’s outlook. He decrees. Everyone else accepts that he “means it.” And so it will be.

This self-centered mentality—whereby Bush expects his desires to be fulfilled immediately—has repeatedly manifested in how he governs. After the president announced his “surge” plan for Iraq in early 2007, CBS News recounted the conversation about the plan that ensued between President Bush and newly inaugurated House Speaker Nancy Pelosi:

In an interview, Pelosi also said she was puzzled by what she considered the president’s minimalist explanation for his confidence in the new surge of 21,500 U.S. troops that he has presented as the crux of a new “way forward” for U.S. forces in Iraq.

“He’s tried this two times—it’s failed twice,” the California Democrat said. “I asked him at the White House, ‘Mr. President, why do you think this time it’s going to work?’ And he said, ‘Because I told them it had to.’”

Asked if the president had elaborated, she added that he simply said, “‘I told them that they had to.’ That was the end of it. That’s the way it is.”

Even after four years of complete chaos and uncontrolled violence in Iraq, Bush expects that his plan will work. Why? Because he
ordered
his generals to make it work, and so it shall be.